How do you guys detect people hitting your site too often/scraping content?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7126062

by screamingfrog • 12 years ago

6 5 12 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I was wonder if you guys manually analyze log files or use a service like Splunk/Loggy/etc to help with detecting abuse? What is your first step in blocking this behavior?

ovechtrick• 12 years ago

You could use http://www.sumologic.com/

Have it send a report when an IP is seen > x times in your logs.

screamingfrog• 12 years ago

Thanks for the tip!

raquo• 12 years ago

- I haven't used any existing tools, but built some easy blockers myself

- Adding hidden-with-css honeypot links with URLs formatted with the same pattern as good links

- Check user agents - many scrapers forget to change "phantomjs" to something else

- Maybe block ip ranges of known vps providers

- make an access_log DB, define some patterns (e.g. regularness / number of visits, skewed distribution of pages viewed, etc.) and look up offending IPs

- decide what to do with offenders - block outright, mangle content (e.g. Obnoxiously watermark images, hide prices, provide less detailed product descriptions, add your brand to titles/descriptions if these are probably your competitors scraping your catalog).

glimcat• 12 years ago

Detect:

Look for high frequency access with low variability in the delay between same-type resource requests. It's a relatively simple heuristic, but great precision & recall for classifying scrapers vs. manual access.

Block:

You can't block a sufficiently determined expert scraper.

You can filter out a lot of scraping if that's a meaningful goal, but it's often not. A good strategy here is rate limiting + header inspection + CAPTCHA on high activity. Possibly add transfer quotas if you have a lot of large assets which might cause problems at low request rates.

This will deal with "script kiddies" and automated tools which account for the majority of cases where scraping could potentially impact the server's ability to respond to other users. It won't block researchers or other scrapers with more sophisticated skills.

I've seen people go wild here, to the point of silly things like displaying database record text as images. Complicated schemes generally impact UX for your routine users, while making it take slightly more time to write a scraper that's already "build once, use until the site is redesigned."

lauradhamilton• 12 years ago

You can set up a honeypot. Include links that only a robot can see, and then whenever someone clicks on that link block the ip address.

How do you guys detect people hitting your site too often/scraping content?

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