Ask HN: Website with 6^16 subpages and 80k+ daily bots

Posted by damir 10/23/2024

Last year, just for fun, I created a single index.php website calculating HEX colors to RGB. It takes 3 and 6 digit notation (ie. #c00 and #cc0000) and converts it to RGB value. No database, just single .php file, converting values on the fly.

It's little over a year old and now every day there's 60k-100k bots visiting and crawling the shit out of two-trillion-something sub pages...

I am out of ideas what to do with this site. I mean, it's probably one of the largest websites on the Internet, if counted by sub-pages...

What cool experiment/idea/stuff should I do/try with this website?

I'm sure AI could be (ab)used somehow here... :)

287 points | 201 commentspage 4

throwaway2037 10/24/2024|

What is the public URL? I couldn't find it from the comments below.

ubl 10/24/2024||

generate 6^16 possible URLs in sitemaps upload sitemaps to your site submit them to google search console for indexing and get them indexed

integrate google adsense and run ads

add a blog to site and sell backlinks

pulse7 10/24/2024||

Make a single-page app instead of the website.

Uptrenda 10/24/2024||

just sounds like you built a search engine spam site with no real value.

berlinbrowndev 10/24/2024||

Did you post the site?

aarreedd 10/24/2024||

Cloudflare is the easiest solution. Turn on Bot Fight Mode and your done

purpolpeople 10/25/2024||

perplexity ai on top ngl

dezb 10/23/2024||

sell backlinks..

embed google ads..

damir 10/23/2024|

99.9% of traffic are bots...

scrps 10/23/2024|

Clearly adjust glasses as an HN amateur color theorist[1] I am shocked and quite frankly appalled that you wouldn't also link to LAB, HSV, and CMYK equivalents, individually of course! /s

That should generate you some link depth for the bots to burn cycles and bandwidth on.

[1]: Not even remotely a color theorist

nneonneo 10/24/2024|

What you really should do is have floating point subpages for giggles, like /LAB/0.317482834/0.8474728828/0.172737838. Then you can have a literally infinite number of pages!