- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
I was hoping the author would advise against using this, because after doing this your website isn’t accessible.
I don’t think this is the answer to web scrapers, since it so adversely affects people with disabilities. The web is one of the few things that is structurally (reasonably) accessible by default even if making inaccessible websites (like the author’s is now) is possible.
If you have to choose between accessibility or letting scrapers to access your site and scrapping accessibility, you should choose accessibility.
Honestly, fuck anyone who seriously implements this on their website.
For those who are too lazy to check what people here in the comments are saying, here’s what happpens when you open the page in reader mode:

I’m not reading that shit:

your search rank will drop
If your goal is to prevent web-scraping, this seems like an intended effect.
Ironically, my first instinct to opening that page and seeing it’s unusual layout and density on mobile was to switch to the reader view. Immediately getting hit with the cyphertext output. Cool, I guess.
I did the exact same thing. Wouldn’t like to see it adopted due to accessibility issues. But its a neat trick.
yZkB-kREXj IjXE cgZejm
Cool.
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There’s literally a code example in the article of how to scramble fonts and html responses
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