Browser Blocking Notice: Anti-Crawler Measures for Old Browser Versions
By
ingve
Right out the toaster. Reliable, with some real depth.
Summary
This article explains that users are seeing an error message because their browser is being blocked by anti-crawler measures. The author is experimenting with blocking old browser versions, particularly Chrome, due to a surge in high-volume crawlers in early 2025 that use outdated user agents, apparently for LLM training data collection. The blocking is implemented to reduce server load on the Wandering Thoughts blog and CSpace wiki.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledYou're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old
As of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that use a variety of old browser user agents, especially Chrome user agents
To reduce the load on Wandering Thoughts I'm experimenting with (attempting to) block all of them, and you've run into this
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