Julian OliverWorking on some poison-as-a-service (PaaS). Looking to launch in the next few days.
Also working on a zip bomb, to randomly scatter in among the links.
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.
@anaiscrosby After seeing ChatGPTBot blow 123 seconds on my drip-feed poison tarpit and then never come back, I got reading on how modern LLM scrapers might employ mechanisms to detect tarpits and blacklist.
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.
AnaisInteresting!! 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
