[ERROR] Links show text "Making sure you're not a bot"

For some reasons some links are showing the text Making sure you’re not a bot:

I’m not sure if it’s intended but it makes reading really uncomfortable and difficult to keep focus on the topic.

Can we do something about it?

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It happens because the script which run on that target server wants the page to do some work in order to prove it’s not a bot. A remote link obviously does not fulfil that request so you get tot see the page title of the “prove you’re not a bot”.

Removing the requirement to perform the work would be the ideal solution. However, in order for this to happen certain vendors have to stop scraping every website under the sun to feed their crappy AI LLM’s. I suspect this is never going to happen so we all suffer this annoyance. :frowning:

We may be able to fix/allow this traffic. We need to investgate how it’s flowing and if we can identify it.

I guess this is discourse requesting the link to use in the link preview?

Can you provide more context to where you are seeing it?

I’m also not sure why it’s happening more now, nothing has changed on the infra side in a while. ;(

It comes up for pages protected by Anubis.

If the author (on Discourse) presses the ‘link’ button or Ctrl+k then they can make a hyperlink with whatever text they want to.

I’ve realized that this is because Discourse tries to generate “rich previews” (or whatever they’re called) when the text contains a plain link.

But if you use the Markdown syntax for bare hyperlinks (<https://....>), that works fine since that’s displayed as-is and doesn’t make Discourse try to generate a nice “preview” for it.

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I’ve tried to set ‘onebox’ settings to force a user agent for our
domains, but I am not sure if it’s actually working…

I did also find:

which sounds like it’s broken. ;(

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Example: Making sure you're not a bot!

or same example when not ‘inline’.

FWIW the workaround is to make markdown links, like

but you have to know that in advance, so that’s pretty annoying.

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