How to Block Some of the Bots | Hacker News

Hacker News commenters debated practical ways to curb automated scanning and scraping, including honeypots, fail2ban, load-balancer headers, and rate-based filtering.

Suggested defenses ranged from fake subdomains and user-agent checks to blocking datacenter traffic and other suspicious patterns.

The discussion also highlighted the risk of collateral damage, where legitimate users can be blocked if they use proxies, relays, CDNs, or shared infrastructure.

Overall, the thread focused on the tradeoff between stopping abusive automation and preserving access for real visitors.