Random thoughts on bots scraping content.

[ford]

At the time of this writing there are 191 members online and 13473 'guests' online browsing mcarterbown.com. For comparison on pbnation 3 members are online and 922 'guests'.

Is it safe to assume the bulk of these 'guests' are bots and if so, is it worth trying to squelch them?

I'm no master of web development but I know there is a cost associated with serving these guests. I like this place, and I'd like to make sure the people who bring it to us aren't having to dump too much extra $$$ to guests who contribute nothing.

Another potential scenario I've thought about are bots scraping for an AI of a multi-billion dollar company taking the thoughts of our collective and potentially profiting off it without as much as a citation.

Does it bother anyone else? I'm not losing sleep, but it doesn't feel sustainable. As AI generated content becomes cheaper and nauseating in its similarity to the best and worst of the internet... How does one distinguish content written by a soul and one written by an algorithm?

Do we lock down the site behind a paywall? Seems counter-intuitive to the vibe we want around here. Do we encrypt/encode the whole site and require an email with a weekly key to view the forum? Do we just accept that prying eyes are watching and if we're not ok with it we should scrabble off to some corner of the dark web?

[BrickHaus]

I agree with you, the guest stats are staggering.

The members section is behind a pay wall, but a bulk of the conversations happen outside of that section.

I'd say we could just kill off viewing any topics unless you are legitimately signed in to an account. Not sure how to make that work statistically, but that's my solution.

[Painthappy]

Its a double edged sword and one you can win. You kill off the viewable and search engine searchable content, no one can find you when searching. Fine for a while, but no new members means a quick death.

Have it searchable, as we do, it isn't private and a lot might be cached for life. Shudders

So I thought of all this and why we made the members section and it is completely private. That way none of the foolish stuff we say will be saved and held against us.

[BrickHaus]

Is there was way to make it searchable, and let the engine grab the information, but also if any IP tries to view it, hit the viewer with a pop up window that forces them to make an account to see the thing the engine could snag? Seems like a nice middle road, but I also have no idea as to how that would be coded.

[gabe]

I'm just amazed we are now bigger than PBNation. That's insane. I've been in and out of the game and didn't realize PBN has been in decline.

[Pumpytrilly1]

I think pbnation was bought by a company that buys other websites and essentially lets them die.

I assume they are trying to control internet opinion now.

[DocsMachine]

Another potential scenario I've thought about are bots scraping for an AI of a multi-billion dollar company taking the thoughts of our collective and potentially profiting off it without as much as a citation.

-Thing to keep in mind is the 'monetizers' don't necessarily make money off what we say, they make it off what we do.

No one is scraping MCB to find the latest info on a MiniMag or Rudy Dean Autococker or even a Proto Rail. They're not using AI to see how many of us are going to the next stock-gun game, or what we think of the World Cup, etc. We're small potatoes in that regard, no one's going to waste resources looking for worthless data.

What they ARE doing is looking for traffic and demographics. How many people does this board see, and at what times of the day. Where do they come in from, and where do they leave to? How often are articles linked from FaceBook, Instagram, Pinterest, Reddit or whatever.

They'd want to know more, if PaintSlappy allowed 3rd-party ads or banners, but really, they're just after traffic numbers and demographics- nobody cares what we're actually talking about.

Doc.

[Carp]

...No one is scraping MCB to find the latest info on ...


(MCB seen here at the recent Super Game East)

....nobody cares what we're actually talking about.

Doc.

FIFY..😉

[Cdn_Cuda]

We’re fine unless AI starts expressing an affinity for brass and mayo. Then we might have a problem.

[Daltech]

https://open.spotify.com/track/76F7FOXjAsTiMbPJ8YXWlj?si=oh6CVX6sSIWn-Qu4alT9UA&context=spotify%3Aartist%3A0GBQgaRsgtvwKEtWQaKjGA

[Nish]

I'm just amazed we are now bigger than PBNation. That's insane. I've been in and out of the game and didn't realize PBN has been in decline.

I didn't realize PBN was still around at all.

[DocsMachine]

I think pbnation was bought by a company that buys other websites and essentially lets them die.

-'Essentially', yes, but they were, in fact, bought with profit in mind. The idea was that the company bought popular, highly-trafficked discussion boards, in order to get the ad revenue from banners and the like. At one time it was a viable business plan- a good, popular board, properly curated, could bring in five figures a year in ad revenue.

But of course everyone moving to Facebook and basically leaving standalone boards to wither and die, and the overall collapse of the value of internet advertising in general, put the kibosh on all of that.

The company that owns PBN, I seem to recall once reading, owns a pile of boards- hundreds? And with only a few exceptions, all of them have become wastelands.

Doc.

[SignOfZeta]

People worry about AI way too much.

[Grendel]

You are right most of it has nothing to do with AI anyway. I have been scraping data from websites and forums for over 16 years for personal and/or professional purposes. Most of the bots are just basic scraping code. A big part of my professional work has to do with farming (scraping) data from various sights then doing some natural language processing on the information to create fragments of data that are usefully labeled. Then I run statistical analysis on the labeled data. I am definitely not an artificial intelligence but a stupid normal human.

[ford]

No one is scraping MCB to find the latest info on a MiniMag or Rudy Dean Autococker or even a Proto Rail. They're not using AI to see how many of us are going to the next stock-gun game, or what we think of the World Cup, etc. We're small potatoes in that regard, no one's going to waste resources looking for worthless data.

Here's a random result using Perplexity.ai which I find a little more open than others.


So we're part of the conversation... I'm not expecting a check in the mail, but while most humans may be sane enough to ignore our conversations, these chat bots may not be =P