I dont believe it is that easy to tell if an IP is coming from a data center
The bad scraping bots are proxying their traffic via resiential IPs, so it doesn’t even matter. Presumably this is through the free TV apps that you see mentioned on Lemmy occasionally, or through compromised devices.
I mean, adding the IP filter means you are getting a number of bots filtered out by a very simple decision making (originating IP address/segment) even before you have to apply any further processing, so it’s still an advantage even if that filter by itself only removes a non-majority portion of bot traffic. It means you are left with more / better processing capacity to filter the rest.
I guess the problem is that you’ve gotta be super careful. If you just block all data centres, you won’t be able to federate with most of the fediverse. It’s got to only be applied to the front end website, not to the API and especially not to the federation endpoints.
Tools like Anubis do the filtering pretty well anyway. Some 75% of traffic we get to the website is blocked without even getting a challenge, because of their list of IPs, user agents, etc.
The bad scraping bots are proxying their traffic via resiential IPs, so it doesn’t even matter. Presumably this is through the free TV apps that you see mentioned on Lemmy occasionally, or through compromised devices.
I mean, adding the IP filter means you are getting a number of bots filtered out by a very simple decision making (originating IP address/segment) even before you have to apply any further processing, so it’s still an advantage even if that filter by itself only removes a non-majority portion of bot traffic. It means you are left with more / better processing capacity to filter the rest.
I guess the problem is that you’ve gotta be super careful. If you just block all data centres, you won’t be able to federate with most of the fediverse. It’s got to only be applied to the front end website, not to the API and especially not to the federation endpoints.
Tools like Anubis do the filtering pretty well anyway. Some 75% of traffic we get to the website is blocked without even getting a challenge, because of their list of IPs, user agents, etc.