I think this community is appropriate for this topic, since this solution is being rolled out to combat AI scraping of websites.
I don’t really understand why the collective agreement is “it is better than captchas would be”, when you didn’t need to pass a captcha just to view a website in the first place. Why are people not more pissed off about every website suddenly requiring this laggy, sometimes actually a captcha anyways (checkbox to prove you are human) solution slowing down visits to websites?
And why can’t CloudFlare offer some way for us lowly non-AI’s to prove we’re human, once, for our entire web experience, versus on. every. damned. website. one. at. a. time?
I counted, and I hit this turnstile solution on 28 website visits today, and sometimes more than once on the same site. That’s minutes of my life I don’t get back, and likely hours to days over the course of a year.
There has to be a better way…
/rant
So like a tracking cookie? Not a great idea for privacy, we’ve been there before…
Also, the reason is that if that worked, then the scrapers would just need to use a human to pass turnstile once, and then let their scraper run wild for the rest of the day, defeating the entire purpose of it.
None of this would be issue if the AI scrapers would just actually follow robots.txt, but they won’t, so here we are :(