Anybody Interested in A Real-Time Bot Filter
How many indie hackers out there would support or know somebody who would support the development of a new technology? I've been developing a real-time filter for HTTP requests that have an IP address registered to several proxy sources around the web. The filter works very easily: Simply put a JavaScript tag in the header of the web-pages you want to filter proxified web requests from, and my remote filters scan that request, and redirects to a 404 if its IP is either missing (tor) or belongs to a proxy IP registrar. Adding it to your site is like adding Google Analytics or CallRail, but it scans the IPs as they come in.
I am a great engineer. But an absolute rubbish marketing person and don't even know if there are those out there who would care about or want such a technology for free, let alone pay for it. Any advice from the community on how to get early adopters and subscribers off the ground? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
I don't think that injecting a js into a website to prevent scanning is a good idea. It'll make the website slower. I would suggest some more passive way, we parse logs real time and block bots ip with max 3 seconds delay. This enabled us to build complicated algorithm that could check if it's a bot, fake bot, a whole class C scan. My websites were protected with this tools for many years and only botnet scans could bypass that.
Makes sense to me and that is a thought I had also. I'm not a huge fan of adding JS to a site when it isn't necessary but it seemed the most marketable idea.
The other implementation I have for it is to filter at the web-server level. With NGINX, for example, we include a second .conf file that updates every 10 minutes with known proxy and blacklisted IPs. The entire file is a series of explicit disallows. I believe that could offload the work to the server rather than relying on the browser and would allow for more stable performance levels. What is your opinion on that?
I use firewall for it, it's the cheapest way to block, but it's not a marketable solution.