A Clever (but not so good) Scraper Protection
a day ago
- The anti-scraping measure uses a custom font where letters are remapped to different characters, so the HTML appears jumbled but the text renders correctly.
- Disabling JavaScript does not break the protection because the font itself is responsible for the obfuscation, not scripts.
- Bypassing requires mapping each jumbled character to its visual letter, but if the font is randomized per page load, the mapping becomes harder.
- To counter automated mapping, the site could add micro-variations to font glyphs, preventing exact matches.
- Advanced bypass options include using OCR or fuzzy matching with AI, but this is resource-intensive.
- The site eventually removed the protection because it negatively impacted search engine crawling and SEO.