I made an AI block

[Noah_S]

https://art-noah-s.eu/index.php/how-i-made#AIblock

It blocks AI. Here's a screenshot of an AI being asked about my website yesterday.



I named it victory vs AI. That's right bot, you're forbidden.

Dan Q wrote a followup with different options for different server configurations. Mine has some workarounds because it's a module in Joomla. And because I like the programming poetry of sending those bots to a forbidden page.

[Dan Q]

It's a very different approach, but I like the technical magic of the strategy taken by Heydon Pickering on his blog. Their approach is that they accepts scraping by well-behaved bots, but they actively sabotage those that don't behave well (which they define as e.g. doesn't respect rel="nofollow", etc.).

If you look at the end of any of their blog posts there's a link explicitly "for" LLMs, marked rel="nofollow", so any properly-behaving scraper (whether AI or not!) shouldn't follow the link. If you follow it, you get a "nonsense" version of the post... possibly generated using something like DaDaDoDo (which I wrote a summary of back in... 2004!). Which in turn links to a further-obfuscated version, and so on... so the deeper an LLM drills through rel="nofollow" links, the more it poisons its own training data with meaningless garbage. Hilarious.

Obviously it'd be possible to use a similar approach to poison all LLM scrapers, if e.g. you detected their user-agent and served them garbage pages. 

Which makes me wonder: would it be possible to implement a reverse-proxy in a webserver that detected particular kinds of scrapers (e.g. AI bots) on-the-fly and served them garbage. It's a much more-aggressive approach than just 403ing them, but it'd be hilarious.

[Dan Q]

Hey @Noah_S: is your site okay?

When I try to connect from home, I get my connection rejected, like you're blocking my IP? (Possibly I triggered some kind of block while I was experimenting with changing my user-agent, to see that you were blocking as you said?)

So I used a different IP address and ran curl htt​ps://art-noah-s.eu/index.php... and got a 403. Adding a header to spoof being Firefox got around it. So it looks like you're blocking... curl? It's not in your list, and it's possibly ill-advised: curl gets used by many legitimate RSS readers (including mine!)?

Anyway: if you want to tell me whether or not you've IP-banned me, that'd be nice! Thanks!

[Noah_S]

I have no idea what's happening with that. I haven't done anything with it since yesterday and it's working fine here?

[Dan Q]

Looks like it's me, specifically, that's getting blocked!

Here's an nmap port scan from some other IP I control:

Code

~ nmap -p 1-1024 185.45.149.138
Starting Nmap 7.93 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-09-15 10:31 UTC
Nmap scan report for webhost1.host-unlimited.de (185.45.149.138)
Host is up (0.021s latency).
Not shown: 1011 filtered tcp ports (no-response)
PORT    STATE SERVICE
21/tcp  open  ftp
22/tcp  open  ssh
25/tcp  open  smtp
53/tcp  open  domain
80/tcp  open  http
106/tcp open  pop3pw
110/tcp open  pop3
143/tcp open  imap
443/tcp open  https
465/tcp open  smtps
587/tcp open  submission
993/tcp open  imaps
995/tcp open  pop3s

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 4.69 seconds

Here's the same port scan from my home IP address:

Code

~ nmap -p 1-1024 185.45.149.138
Starting Nmap 7.991 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2026-09-15 11:32 +0100
Nmap scan report for webhost1.host-unlimited.de (185.45.149.138)
Host is up (0.031s latency).
Not shown: 1011 filtered tcp ports (no-response)
PORT    STATE  SERVICE
21/tcp  open   ftp
22/tcp  open   ssh
25/tcp  open   smtp
53/tcp  open   domain
80/tcp  closed http
106/tcp open   pop3pw
110/tcp open   pop3
143/tcp open   imap
443/tcp closed https
465/tcp open   smtps
587/tcp open   submission
993/tcp open   imaps
995/tcp open   pop3s

Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 43.18 seconds

It looks like ports 80 (http) and 443 (https) are explicitly being blocked from being accessed by my IP address! Possibly firewall configuration?

Weird that it happened now, of course! (Which is why I initially wondered if I'd hit one of your anti-AI Bot things!)

[Noah_S]

I've contacted my host about it. I also thought about that AI block at first, that's why I asked about the lost fox on error 404 in the chat.