Small update as I'm now tired and going off to sleep.

I have finally implemented go-away on our main site and it hasn't broken (fingers crossed) any of our frontends!

I have added the non-js challenge which is called a meta-refresh challenge. This means those of you who view sites without javascript will also be able to continue using reddthat without troubles, but the bots are already failing!

We currently have sent the HTTP 418 (I'm a tea pot) Response code over 1900 times since implementing goaway (within the last 5 minutes)

I'll be looking to add a JS challenge in the coming weeks if the bots start implementing proper browsers.

FYI. If you are affected by this, and cannot seem to complete the challenge, you can get around this by using our Voyager frontend to let me know, or any Lemmy application. As both of those directly interface with the API endpoints.

Cheers,

Tiff

Edit. In the past 12 hours we have had the following total queries by http code:

Count   HTTP Code
   4654 200 <- people who "completed" the "challenge"
    406 206
    122 301
      8 302
    243 307
    204 400
      3 403
    479 404
  34946 418 <- very bad bots
      1 499
    186 500
   1617 502 <- meta, openAI, bytedance, etc 
      4 503
      2 504