Txt.fyi

[ficuswhisperer]

@Archon

And someone doesn’t.

That was already suggested here by @fuzzyfungus

[OtherMichael]

Hey, mad props to @beschizza for the cite, but I’m chuffed they used my art for the illustration!

[beschizza]

Scrapers are hitting it. I’m thinking of making the 404 a randomly generated poem so they aren’t disappointed.

[OtherMichael]

Hrmmmm…

[OtherMichael]

Using the text of http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks05/0500141h.html

[Archon]

@ficuswhisperer

That was already suggested here by @fuzzyfungus

Oh, I wasn’t suggesting that commenter over there was being original.

Plus, the difference is that @fuzzyfungus was just being somewhat evil while pointing out a weakness, without all the ‘for the lulz’ crap that just made it obnoxious.
IMAO, of course.

[Archon]

If you can spot scraping, maybe have a list of randomly selected ‘plausible’ txts that you silently start serving instead of the real ones once the scraper threshold is tripped?

(Maybe throw in things like half the fortune database, the I-ching, the text of the Kama Sutra for good measure - plausible stuff, but wrong.)

The scraper won’t know they’re not getting the real thing, but any ‘archive’ or Google index-y redirect trickery would just be completely and utterly incorrect.

I’d be happy to contribute false-but-plausible messages to add to a random file for that purpose.

[Archon]

Oooh! Oooh! Randomly generated shopping lists!
[Edit: Maybe not. ]

[OtherMichael]

Did you say generated lists?

List Mania

[Archon]

gasp So I only thought I was going too far, there.