Abusing Ahrefs backlink checker (trickster.dev)

Ahrefs was using recaptcha until recently, I wonder if that was abused in the same way or whatever the reason for them switching up was.

Do Ahrefs et al operate their own crawling infrastructure or is there another third party vendor for this?

The main point of this article is that you can pay humans to solve CAPTCHAs, via a company which acts as middle-man.

The company in question (Kolotibablo) has a website at https://kolostories.com/ which argues that paid CAPTCHA-solving is a good economic option for the people who do it. Maybe it is? I can't decide.

I wonder if it's cheaper to just pay for a subscription and get access to their API - given that solving captcha cost $1-2.

Hmm is this still cheaper than purchasing the service?

You can make the text a bit more legible with this userstyle:

    body {
        --fg: white;
        font-family: sans-serif;
    }

I wonder if there's some architectural reason for using `["Status", {}]` shapes instead of a more traditional response shape

    [
        "Ok",
        {
            "data": {

It seems to place a lot of the error detection burden upon the caller, since the response can be empty `[]`, it can have a status without a body (which, I guess may be fine for their api?) `["OkHarHar"]`, and then the usual promises-made-promises-kept of the expected keys being in the `response[1]` location. One can see this heartache sort of play out in the subsequent python code in the blog post although they just return None in the simple `len() != 2` case

    match (response) {
      ["Ok", { data }] => { ... },
      ["Error", { error }] => { ...handle known error... }
      _ => { ...handle unknown error... },
    }

I guess that explains why Turnstile has been as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike for stopping automated signups for me.