Day 19 of the daily accountability challenge

Accountability for 9/27/23

Well.

Yesterday was a day. The family things I’ve been dealing with are continuing to bleed into every new day. Here’s hoping it will ease up soon and give me back my creative energy!

I ended the day having written 82 words, on 1 story.

At least it wasn’t a zero word day? Even if that’s just a small win, I’ll take it. :)

Here’s how to block OpenAI’s bot crawlers in your robots.txt file

I went looking for this information this morning, and although it’s nice that everyone wants to give you the entire history of robots.txt and web crawlers and the like, sometimes (okay, most of the time) I just want the info I came for.

Now I’m going to share, without all the extraneous history lessons.

Block OpenAI’s GPTBot

Straight from the source: https://platform.openai.com/docs/gptbot

User-agent: GPTBot
Disallow: /

This goes in the robots.txt file.

I don’t need more than the basics, because I’m not interested in allowing access to certain directories and whatnot. But you can follow the link for more details if you want something else.

On a different page, there was also information on how to block ChatGPT plugins from accessing my site.

Block OpenAI’s ChatGPT plugins

Straight from the source: https://platform.openai.com/docs/plugins/bot

User-agent: ChatGPT-User
Disallow: /

To be honest, I’m not sure whether I want to block the plugins or not, but better safe than sorry. I can always undo it later simply by deleting the lines from my robots.txt file.

Why I’m blocking them

You could say this is a statement from me about copyright and you might be somewhat right. I own the content I write. But, in reality, it’s more about me making a statement about controlling where my writing and ramblings end up.

I ramble here because I want to share, but that doesn’t mean I want everyone in the world to just grab it up and put it wherever. I’ve blocked google’s image bot for years and years, and the same goes for the internet archive (when they honor it).

The fact is, my blog is my house, and I don’t like the idea of people coming onto my lawn, grabbing my signs, and running with them. Especially not so they can build a commercial product that benefits them financially and gives me nada.

Money hungry? Why, yes, I am. They’re more than welcome to pay me $$$ and license my content for training. I’d probably say yes. :D

A year later and I just realized…

At some point, during one of my several theme changes for this site over the last year or two (probably this one), I’ve lost my sidebar widget that included my personal best records (and one or two personal worsts, but they’re only there to remind myself not to let it happen again). :o :D

Since I had copied the widget into OneNote at some point in the past, I didn’t actually lose them. They just weren’t on the site anymore. Now, my stats have their own page. :)