Ask HN: My website is being attacked by Facebook's bots. Anyone have a contact?

1 pointsbwb1mo ago2 comments

The site is BookDNA.com, and I finally had to block their ASN as the server was crashing.

Does anyone have contacts for someone there who can help?

Their bots do not seem to respect our robots.txt file. They are hammering two specific pages that robots.txt makes off-limits to bots, and the majority of hits are on those two pages.

/bookshelf/action/book-dna

and

/bookshelf/historical-romance/book-dna

Fun fact: In the last 12 hours, Facebook's bot volume is 12x Microsoft, 19x Apple, and 20x Google.

2 comments

Bender1mo ago

Unlikely you get a FB contact for their bot operators.

How many requests per second are they making and have you blocked their ASN or updated your app to put their bots into a bot trap of sorts yet?

bwbOP1mo ago

ya I gave up and blocked their ASN.

No trap yet, but thinking about it. Everyone else is a good internet citizen, but this has happened again and again.

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