Open-source developers are disproportionately affected by AI web crawlers that ignore the robots.txt protocol. They're fighting back with clever tools and strategies, ranging from reverse proxies to country-wide IP blocks, to counteract the aggressive scraping and potential DDoS attacks.
AI crawlers ignore robots.txt, causing issues for open-source projects
Open-source projects have fewer resources to combat these attacks
Developers are using various methods, including reverse proxies and IP blocking, to fight back