Google and the open web... round #2

[Kodama]

Another revenue stream although maybe small could be a merch shop. I would love to contribute designs that maybe get voted on but would certainly love to proudly wear and promote Bonsai Nut Gear!

 

[RJG2]

Another revenue stream although maybe small could be a merch shop. I would love to contribute designs that maybe get voted on but would certainly love to proudly wear and promote Bonsai Nut Gear!

I can't count the number of people that want a T-shirt (myself included)!

 

[Michael P]

Maybe use the PBS/NPR model, have pledge drives.

I like this idea.

 

[Lara_Ericacious]

Another revenue stream although maybe small could be a merch shop. I would love to contribute designs that maybe get voted on but would certainly love to proudly wear and promote Bonsai Nut Gear!

I would wear bonsai nut tshirts exclusively for work.

 

[JeffS73]

More thoughts... the newspaper I read has a pop-up reminder of how many articles I've read if I haven't paid, so no pay wall but constantly prices your conscience.
Glazy locks some features, im not sure theres a minimum but make a small recurring payment there and the guitar teacher I subscribe to on patreon makes downloads available for paying patrons, again no minimum charge.
I think it's important not to lock people out, big risk of membership dwindling.

 

[ABCarve]

I went to donate again and couldn’t find any “donate button” on my phone version. “Installed app” didn’t do anything. IPHONE 11. Need email for PayPal? @Bonsai Nut I’ll consider this thread a pledge drive.

 

[Jrmcmich]

wonder if your able to add Apple Pay? Easy to use

 

[Paradox]

I went to donate again and couldn’t find any “donate button” on my phone version. “Installed app” didn’t do anything. IPHONE 11. Need email for PayPal? @Bonsai Nut I’ll consider this thread a pledge drive.

Can you see the home page? Ie not the forum page. Find the link for "home". It's on there at the bottom.

 

[WIlliam_Butler_Yeets]

Another option just to mention, and I haven't looked into it much, I don't know if it could ever be cost effective, is to use one of those ai-labyrinth programs like Anubis, which to my understanding, can use a few different tests to make sure traffic to your website is coming from an actual person using a web browser instead of an ai scraper before it loads any content, if it detects a scraper, the site simply won't load for them.

But whatever ends up happening, I'd be happy to join a paid membership tier. Maybe to keep drawing in people we could leave the "new to bonsai" forum public and be a bit more strict about how in depth we get over there to incentivize people to join up and get the more involved information.

 

[Zac]

For the t-shirt part there's companies that do the screen printing and handle all the Logistics so there's not more put on @bonsainut Will not make as much off them but easier on you. I know the fast ink screen printers in mercersburg made shirts a shipped them domestically for a local fundraise. I can look into that.

 

[Zac]

.

 

[Kanorin]

Happy to pay a yearly membership. Over the next couple of months I'll make a few Bonsai Nut fundraiser pots to auction off as well.

 

[August44]

I'm in for whatever you need boss man, and I personally, would like to see you get rid of Google. They want to take over the world.

 

[shohin_branches]

Hey @Bonsai Nut
You can block many AI scraper bots using robots.txt.

This is a good resource for the options you have for blocking AI scrapers
https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

but the quickest win would be to add this to your disallow list in your robots.txt file

ai.robots.txt/robots.txt at main · ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

A list of AI agents and robots to block. Contribute to ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Blocking these bots will also reduce some of your bandwidth costs that could be inflating from the requests they make to the site.
It may also hurt your google search engine ranking so there may be a tradeoff.

 

[RJG2]

Hey @Bonsai Nut
You can block many AI scraper bots using robots.txt.

This is a good resource for the options you have for blocking AI scrapers
https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

but the quickest win would be to add this to your disallow list in your robots.txt file

ai.robots.txt/robots.txt at main · ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt

A list of AI agents and robots to block. Contribute to ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

Blocking these bots will also reduce some of your bandwidth costs that could be inflating from the requests they make to the site.
It may also hurt your google search engine ranking so there may be a tradeoff.

Maybe it will help with more honest players, but I'm not sure any of them are honest anymore. Robots.txt is really an "honor system" anyway.

Some go to more extreme means to circumvent any blocks:

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives

Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

blog.cloudflare.com

 

[shohin_branches]

Maybe it will help with more honest players, but I'm not sure any of them are honest anymore. Robots.txt is really an "honor system" anyway.

Some go to more extreme means to circumvent any blocks:

Perplexity is using stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives

Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing IPs and ASNs to hide their crawling activity, in direct conflict with explicit no-crawl preferences expressed by websites.

blog.cloudflare.com

yes, I understand. It's a command not security. That's why the github repo has multiple methods of controlling access.