Hopefully-useful tidbits of code and information.
For a while I’ve been using monitoRSS to broadcast a bunch of RSS feeds to various Discord channels. However, they’ve cut back on the free tier’s capabilities, and the paid tiers are rather expensive. So, this pushed me into finally creating rss2discord, a self-hosted RSS posting bot which you can run from anywhere that you can run Python scripts.
Hopefully this is useful to someone else as well.
For now it’s pretty basic but I’ve got a bunch of ideas for improving it.
After figuring out a basic anti-bot measure for Publ, I decided to try building a simple experiment for Flask in general.
Here is an extremely simple implementation that has worked amazingly well, having implemented it on The Flickr Random Image Generatr.
This morning I was once again thinking about how to put some proper antibot behavior onto my websites, without relying on Cloudflare. There are plenty of fronting proxies like Anubis and Go Away which put a simple proof-of-work task in front of a website. This is pretty effective, but it adds more of an admin tax (and is often quite difficult to configure for servers that host multiple websites, such as mine), and sometimes the false positive rates can have some other bad effects, such as disallowing feed readers and the like.
I started going down the path of how to integrate antibot stuff directly into Flask, using an @app.before_request rule that would do much of the same work as Anubis et al, but really the various bots are very stupid and the reason the challenge even works is because they aren’t running any JavaScript at all. This made me think that a better approach would be to have it just look for a simple signed cookie, and if that cookie isn’t there, insert an interstitial page that sets it via form POST (with a Javascript wrapper to automatically submit the form).
But then I realized, Publ already provides this sort of humanity test: the login page!
