Blocking AI bots ⛔

Every few months, I inevitably catch a cold or some other virus and end up stuck at home for a few days. Right now, I’m in one of those phases again. Thankfully, this time hasn’t been too bad, and I’m already on the mend. After a lot of Netflix marathons, I realized I couldn’t just sit around doing nothing – I’m the kind of person who needs to feel productive, even when I’m under the weather.

So today, instead of only binge-watching videos, I decided to do some coding. I put together a new plugin for GoBlog that automatically fetches a list of AI scraper bots and takes action against them. It updates the robots.txt file to block these bots and also sends a 403 HTTP error when they try to access my site.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I occasionally use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Microsoft Copilot myself. But it really bothers me that these AI companies use my server resources and bandwidth to build their massive databases, reaping huge profits while leaving me to bear the costs. To make meaningful use of their databases, I’d need to pay for expensive subscriptions or API requests. It feels unfair, and this little plugin is my way of pushing back.

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