CPU spikes are worrying, so will need to work the threading a bit and provision a couple more cores.

It has a rhythm of ~10-15s gorging, then a pause for 20-30s, and then at it again

Strange is that soon after other IPs were reaching statistically non-guessable randomly generated URL paths, without touching the webroot or another other tarpit URL prior. They all had iOS UA strings (readily forged).

---
216.73.216.124 - - [07/Apr/2026:03:28:49 +0200] "GET /tarpit/until/same/drive/harmattan_leftmost_intranscalency_few_ministries_few_between HTTP/2.0" 200 10132 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "-"
---

Much of the time it's just about pushing back. If concerted, and at scale, it can indeed bring about tangible change.

250 samples can poison even the largest models. That’s one webring! Even if detectable, might be a good way to avoid getting scraped?

Interesting!! Based on my little experience implementing a similar tarpit using spigot (https://github.com/gw1urf/spigot) via @pengfold, I’ve noticed something pretty similar - bursts of activity (millions of hits/day) followed by long stretches of silence. From the intensity and patterns, it does seem like many scrapers aren’t consistently avoiding the tarpit, at least initially.

That said, I’d be a bit cautious about that conclusion. What you might be seeing isn’t necessarily "they can’t avoid it," but more like:

- some scrapers don’t try to detect tarpits (they just brute-force crawl and eat the cost)
- others probe once, flag it, and then blacklist it, hence the sudden silence
- and some operate in waves (rotating IPs / infrastructure), which can look like on/off behavior

During research I came across this tarpit evading scraper that provides some interesting insights into how modern LLM scrapers might do this.

https://github.com/Draconiator/Ipema

This gives me pause and has me looking at other solutions for counter-detection.

The GeoCities CSS is going nowhere.

How do you differentiate Ai bots from search engine bots from sploit scrapers?

I've seen sploit scrapers in my logs, but I wouldn't be able to disambiguate Ai from indexer.

I am already seeing bots chewing into my tarpit, & spending time++ getting lost, wasting cycles, and soon I'll be flooding their RAM. While they keep coming back (they are, over and over), my little swamp will be waiting.

If I & others are managing to contribute to the "slop pile", that's great. We're helping keep genAI text distinguishable from human generated content in an era of unregulated deception

This ' #antiAI content' that reads exactly like bad #LLM output on a gradient that looks like a 90s sticker book had a stroke. The snake isn't just eating its own tail, it's leaving a five-star review of the experience.

It won't work because scrapers don't care about your CSS. The text is still plaintext in the HTML. The gibberish doesn't poison anything, models already train on billions of tokens of garbage and route around it. And if your adversarial content is indistinguishable from the thing you're fighting, you're just contributing to the slop pile for free.

#adversarialAi not

Thanks to @anaiscrosby I came across this excellent method, using LZ77:

https://natechoe.dev/blog/2025-08-04.html

TBH I was just going to `dd if=/dev/urandom` my way to a titanic RAM flooding *.gz, but am getting great results with the above, and with bonus site data honey inside to keep bots on the chase.

Looking forward to it!! Also, you might find this great list helpful: https://algorithmic-sabotage.gitlab.io/asrg/sabot-in-the-age-of-ai/ via @asrg. It brings together a range of related approaches and could be useful as you refine things before launch.