Blocking an ASN (or similar) from my sites
The article discusses the challenges of managing artificial traffic from bots on personal websites. The author explores methods to block traffic from specific Autonomous System Numbers (ASNs) to reduce this unwanted load. It also highlights the technical steps involved in implementing these blocks while addressing potential issues that may arise from such actions.
- ▪The author runs several popular websites and faces issues with artificial traffic from bots.
- ▪To block unwanted traffic, the author uses ASN lists and firewall configurations.
- ▪The process involves consolidating IP ranges to efficiently manage blocks and prevent server overload.
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Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Co |
| Canonical URL | https://dracos.co.uk/wrote/blocking-an-asn/ |
| Publication time | Sun, 24 May 2026 14:48:27 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-24T15:07:33.299Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-24T15:07:33.299Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | JWK3-8WXLE0I |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Blocking an ASN (or similar) from my sites24th May 2026 I run a number of websites, some of which could even be said to be popular. I want humans to visit these websites, enjoy these websites, make their change of trains at New Street in good time, investigate miscarriages of justice, or find out the play they watched in London when hitch-hiking round Europe in the ’80s. But I find it harder to do this when my server is swamped with artificial traffic from bots, AI clankers, and whatever else nonsense there is nowadays (Weird Gloop has a good summary; I don’t have wikis but for other reasons am basically in the same boat).
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Co.
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