HACKER Q&A
📣 asdasads

Is bot detection snake oil?


Do solutions that attempt to prevent bots and scrapers actually work? Are they worth the money?

  👤 brianhama Accepted Answer ✓
We used to have a huge problem with bots. Then I came up with the idea of filtering incoming traffic by ASN. Specifically, by filtering out all traffic coming from cloud hosting, data centers, proxy farms, etc we were able to eliminate practically all bot activity. Filtering by ASN is far more effective than by IP address. I started a GitHub repo with a list of bad ASNs and further instructions here: https://github.com/brianhama/bad-asn-list
👤 magixx
It's always going to be a cat and mouse game. The bottom line is always going to be how much botting costs you. This could be measured directly in resource costs or indirectly like brand perception. There are probably quite a few free/DIY solutions or methods you can try out.