I don’t really get those bots.
Like, there are bots that are trying to scrape product info, or prices, or scan for quantity fields. But why the hell do some of these bots behave the way they do?
Do you use Shopify by chance? With Shopify the bots could be scraping the product.json endpoint unless it’s disabled in your theme. Shopify just seems to show the updated at timestamp from the db in their headers+product data, so inventory quantity changes actually result in a timestamp change that can be used to estimate your sales.
There are companies that do that and sell sales numbers to competitors.
No idea why they have inventory info on their products table, it’s probably a performance optimization.
I haven’t really done much scraping work in a while, not since before these new stupid scrapers started proliferating.
Negative. Our solution is completely home grown. All artisinal-like, from scratch. I can’t imagine I reveal anything anyone would care about much except product specs, and our inventory and pricing really doesn’t change very frequently.
Even so, you think someone bothering to run a botnet to hound our site would distribute page loads across all of our products, right? Not just one. It’s nonsensical.
Can you just move that product to a new URL? What happens?
It doesn’t quite work that way, since the URL is also the model number/SKU which comes from the manufacturer. I suppose I could write an alias for just that product but it would become rather confusing.
What I did experiment with was temporarily deleting the product altogether for a day or two. (We barely ever sell it. Maybe 1 or 2 units of it a year. This is no great loss in the name of science.) This causes our page to return a 404 when you try to request it. The bots blithely ignored this, and continued attempting to hammer that nonexistent page all the same. Puzzling.
This is far beyond my limited coding experience but I do enjoy a good puzzle. In your opinion do you think it could be some gen AI scraper. Like the gen AI is deciding what page to scrape and cuz its stupid it keeps selecting your page?
Alternatively I wonder if the product page just happens to have an unsual combinination of keywords that the bot is looking for. Maybe its looking for cheap prices of RAM and the page has some keywords related to RAM?
Good luck I hope you are able to get them to start hammering that page.
Could it be a competitor for that particular product? Hired some foreign entity to hit anything related to their own product?
Maybe, but I also carry literally hundreds of other products from that same brand including several that are basically identical with trivial differences, and they’re only picking on that one particular SKU.
Have you googled the SKU and see if anything else happens to share the number?
Yeah, that’s the kind of weird shit I don’t understand. Someone on the other hand is paying for servers and a residential proxy to send that traffic too. Why?
porcoesphino@mander.xyz 4 months ago
Have you ever tried writing a scrapper. I have for offline reference material. You’ll do that a few times and know. I usually only want a relatively small site (say a Khan Academy lesson which doesn’t save text offline, just videos) and put in a large delay between requests but I’ll still come back after thinking I have it down and it’s thrashed something