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We Do Not Support Opt-Out Forms (2025)
  • wincy
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  • 17 minutes ago
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It’s wild when I read a professional looking website like this and Conscious Digital misspells their own org name as “Consious Digital” in the first paragraph. I’m glad they’re fighting against email spam but it just raises all sorts of red flags in my mind, or at least it used to.

Funny enough, these days it indicates the article was written by a human. I had a dev join my team and made a few typos and it gave me a chuckle, as it’s a whole class of mistake I hadn’t seen in awhile.

| Since emails are sent from the individual’s email account, they are already verified.

This is not how email works, though.

This.

I wonder if it is a generation gap thing. The young folks these days have probably used only Gmail, Proton or one of these big email services that abstract away all the technical details of sending and receiving emails. Without some visibility into the technical details of how emails are composed and sent they might not have ever known that the email headers are not some definite source of truth but totally user defined and can be set to anything.

98% of email users of any generation don't have the first clue how the protocol works.
  • pif
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  • 1 hour ago
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Eh, nice times, when you could type an email just by telnetting to port 25...
I've certainly sent thousands of emails this way. It was a simpler time.
  • kro
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  • 1 hour ago
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+1, Even if they validate DKIM/SPF+alignment (aka DMARC) that would only verify the domain. There is no local part verification possible for the receiver, the sending server needs to be trusted with proper auth
The irony of a site about AI opt-outs getting hammered by AI scrapers is almost too on the nose.

trollbridge's point about scrapers using residential IPs and targeting authentication endpoints matches what we've seen. The scrapers have gotten sophisticated. They're not just crawling, they're probing.

The economics are broken. Running a small site used to cost almost nothing. Now you need to either pay for CDN/protection or spend time playing whack-a-mole with bad actors.

ronsor hosting a front-page HN project on 32MB RAM is impressive and also highlights how much bloat we've normalized. The scraper problem is real, but so is the software efficiency problem.

https://archive.ph/QCMjJ if it helps
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  • 2 hours ago
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Archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20251009081648/https://conscious...

That wasn't working for me, but this one was: https://archive.ph/QCMjJ
That site doesn't seem to support pages loading either.

edit: I feel their pain - I've spent the past week fighting AI scrapers on multiple sites hitting routes that somehow bypass Cloudflare's cache. Thousands of requests per minute, often to URLs that have never even existed. Baidu and OpenAI, I'm looking at you.

Are they hitting non-existent pages? I had ip addresses scanning my personal server including hitting pages that don't exist. I had fail2ban running already so I just turned on the nginx filters (and had to modify the regexs a bit to get them working). I turned on the recididiv jail too. It's been working great.
Might be worth checking if they are appending random query strings to force cache misses. Usually you can normalize the request at the edge to strip those out and protect the origin.
There is currently some AI scraper that uses residential IP addresses and a variety of techniques to conceal itself that likes downloading Swagger generated docs over… and over… and over.

Plus hitting the endpoints for authentication that return 403 over and over.

My n100 minipc can serve over 20k requests per second with nginx (well, it could, if not for the gigabit NIC limiting it). Actually IIRC it can (again, modulo uplink) do more like 40k rps for 404 or 304s.
> often to URLs that have never even existed

Oh you're so deterministic.

Why are "thousands" of requests noticable in any way? Webservers are so powerful nowadays.
Small, cheap VPSs that are ideal for running a small niche-interest blog or forum will easily fall over if they suddenly get thousands of requests in a short time.

Look at how many sites still get "HN hugged" (formerly known as "slashdotted").

I remember my first project posted to HN was hosted on a router with 32MB of RAM and a puny MIPS CPU; despite hitting the front page, it did not crash.

At this point, I have to assume that most software is too inefficient to be exposed to the Internet, and that becomes obvious with any real load.

While true, it's also true that it was (presumably) able to run and serve its intended audience until the scrapers came along.
It's not just one scraper.
IP blocking Asia took my abusive scans down 95%.

I also do not have a robots.txt so google doesnt index.

Got some scanners who left a message how to index or dei dex, but was like 3 lines total in my log (thats not abusive).

But yeah, blocking the whole of Asia stopped soooo much of the net-shit.

> I also do not have a robots.txt so google doesnt index.

That doesn't sound right. I don't have robots.txt too but Google indexes everything for me.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46681454

I think this is a recent change.

All the comments there seem to suggest that there has been no change and that robots.txt isn't required.
How did you block Asia, cloudflare or something else?