Spam bots flooding static website and filling `<form>` fields

[tommi]

What type of hardware are you using: VPS bought online
What YunoHost version are you running: 12.1.6.1
What app is this about: my_webapp

Describe your issue

I host a static website that contains a simple <form> field.

That form is filled out and submitted by an average of five spambots (maybe AI crawlers) per day.

How can I block bots? I have a pretty strict robots.txt, but I guess nobody respects that any more nowadays.

Related threads

Anubis on YunoHost

What type of hardware are you using: VPS bought online What YunoHost version are you running: 12.1.6.1 What app is this about: Anubis Describe your issue I have installed the testing branch of the WIP Anubis package on https://test.tommi.space, but I see nothing and I don’t know how to debug/troubleshoot this issue. Share relevant logs or error messages The linked page gives me error 502

Prevent LLM scrapers/trawlers?

LLM trawlers are becoming more aggressive, and can consume substantial bandwidth and CPU power. For that and other reasons, I would guess most Yunohost users don’t want their sites to be trawled. Old approaches like robots.txt are not guaranteed to work, so other ways of stopping and/or poisoning LLMs are developed (iocaine, Nepenthes etc.). It is reasonable to expect that stopping LLMs is a moving target. It is unreasonable to expect individuals to cope with it. I suggest some Yunohost service…

Share relevant logs or error messages

Not relevant

[rungeard]

Did you try adding a captcha to the form ?

Here are some open-source self-host options :
https://alternativeto.net/software/recaptcha/?license=opensource&platform=self-hosted

[tommi]

I did now. Unfortunately it seems like YunoHost doesn’t have any captcha software packaged, so I am using the hCaptcha free tier.