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From the personal blog of interface expert Bruce Ediger:
Early in March 2025, I noticed that a web crawler with a user
agent string of
meta-externalagent/1.1 (+https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/crawler)
was hitting my blog’s machine at an unreasonable rate.
I followed the URL and discovered this is what Meta uses to gather premium,
human-generated content to train its LLMs. I found the rate of
requests to be annoying.
I already have a PHP program that creates the illusion of an infinite website. I decided to answer any HTTP request that had
“meta-externalagent” in its user agent string with the contents
of a bork.php generated file…
This worked
brilliantly. Meta ramped up to requesting 270,000 URLs on May 30 and
31, 2025…
After about 3 months, I got scared that Meta’s insatiable
consumption of Super Great Pages about condiments, underwear and
circa 2010 C-List celebs would start costing me money. So I switched
to giving “meta-externalagent” a 404 status code. I decided to
see how long it would take one of the highest valued companies in the
world to decide to go away.
The answer is 5 months.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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