Re: Introducing CarBot!
Posted: Fri Feb 20, 2026 8:22 pm
Excellent points which not only remind us all about "scraping bots" that plague so much of the internet but also the efforts and expense that you have gone through to stop them from bogging down Carpokes.Tom wrote: Fri Feb 20, 2026 6:14 pmAbsolutely. Done! CarBot does not use posts to train, full stop. It runs on a public AI model augmented with a custom Porsche knowledge base I personally create. It does not scrape posts here (or anywhere).jsheradin wrote: Fri Feb 20, 2026 5:19 pm Is there a way I can opt out of having my posts used as training data?
As for scraping more broadly, when I realized AI bots from around the world were hitting Carpokes last year, we invested significant effort into stopping them. At one point we had over 4,000 bots scraping the site simultaneously. It was bogging down the site and -- like you -- it didn't feel right to me for a number of reasons. Today, virtually all of those are blocked, thanks to a not-cheap Cloudflare subscription, custom bot rules, and server access controls. It’s always a bit of a cat-and-mouse game with the bots, but I’m confident that public posts on Carpokes are less likely to be picked up by AI training bots than posts made on many large commercial platforms.
Hope that helps, but welcome all feedback.
It also explains why your new CarBot won't function on Carpokes as a substitute search engine for finding posts about specific things using keywords, etc. As I've discovered, preventing AI from searching through posts on Carpokes is a good thing. Thanks for looking out for everyone.