The Glade Art PoW link protector: what it is, and why you should use it to prevent bots from crawling your links:

Hello everyone, and welcome to the Glade Art Blog. The PoW (proof of work) challenge link protector has launched today, and here is what it is, why, and how you should use it to prevent bots from crawling links which you share online. This is of course a 100% free tool with no ads and no crypto mining. You can use it here: https://gladeart.com/pow-link-protector > What is this? You may be familiar with URL shorteners. These are usually websites which can shorten your URLs for you to make them fit into places easier, and so that they look better. This is sort of comparable to that, except it's not: before being redirected to the destination URL, the user must solve a PoW challenge using JavaScript (JS). This is a page which gives a SHA 256 puzzle, similar to Hashcash, which uses the clients' CPU resources to solve it. It only takes a few seconds on average, and no manual intervention is required. Additionally, as per usual on Glade Art, the page has Anubis at difficulty 4 on it for good measure. And so, after solving the proof of work challenge, the user is redirected to their destination site. You can try this link for example: https://gladeart.com/go/1778419316391ToEmcwrie-Nn777xytJTMQUoqXnwCkjParVEgfSESXs > What is this needed for? While niche, there are many different applications which this can be used for. Here are a few examples: * You want to share an image online, e.g. in the comments section of a social media platform, and you don't want the image to be AI trained on. Assuming the image is uploaded to a server which doesn't train AI on its contents, perhaps your own server, you can use the GA PoW link protector as the 'proxy' in between the 2 links. * You want to share the link of your project on a forum, but you don't want bots to discover it. Perhaps you have a strong, not practically guessable URL slug for that page. You can use the protector to protect the link. * You want to share a link which shows your email or phone number, but you don't want it to be discovered and spammed by bots. Again, assuming that the slug is long enough to not be guessable on the destination site, this can add protection to it when shared. > Are PoW challenges effective against bots? Yes. You may think that a few seconds of 100% CPU load wouldn't cost them much, but if you look at the scale at which these bot swarms operate at, it is quite clear that the cost of this adds up greatly. In fact, nearly no bots even have JS enabled, let alone solve JS challenges like these. You can learn more about some PoW challenge and bot analytics right here: https://gladeart.com/blog/the-bot-situation-on-the-internet-is-actually-worse-than-you-could-imagine-heres-why <> Additional challenges: you may optionally select a link to only allow authenticated Glade Art users. If so, you may also add an account age requirement. You can set your link expiration as well, with the maximum of 1 year. Before figuring out that a link doesn't exist, is expired, or requires authentication, the user must solve the challenge. This is for max global CPU burn, thus making scanning random gladeart.com/go/ links shared online quite expensive. So yeah, if you have some links to protect like this, feel free to use this. Or maybe you don't have anything sensitive for bots to share, and you just want to increase UX friction for people and add CPU burn. Either way, this tool will be happy to help, lol. Have a nice day and stay safe!