Post #1584733

2026-04-23 16:03 UTC

How many permutations of tags are there? A butttonne, and the bot will diligently check out ALL OF THEM. Thousands and thousands of page loads! And even though all of them have 0 images to display, there will still be a tag list to choose from, and it will always visually update to indicate which tags are currently selected. So the page can't just be saved in a static HTML file, and the bot isn't going to load anything from it's own cache. 🧵6/?

Replies (3)

@jsstaedtler@mastodon.art 2026-04-23 16:09

I'm not fundamentally opposed to web crawlers, I would actually love it if my work is more discoverable. But this is such an obnoxious situation that I'm forced to accomodate or protect against. I'm starting to think I need to test for mutually exclusive tags, and if two or more are selected, the resulting page will have no links at all except one to go back. That will deny the bots any more links to dive into. But maybe there are better options? I'd wager this is not a novel issue... 🧵7/7

Open ##1584732
@snuggle_slime@catgirl.works 2026-04-23 19:54

@jsstaedtler@mastodon.art another thing you can add is to exclude mutually exclusive tags when generating links. This will also prevent users from doing the same thing and getting confused when they see nothing Edit: derp, I didn't see your followup in the chain saying exactly this until after I posted

Open ##2676155
@hylianwest@mastodon.art 2026-04-24 03:44

@jsstaedtler@mastodon.art Can you detect this behavior and block the client IP address in response?

Open ##2676157