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I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage

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Hey HN -- I'm a solo dev. Built this because I got tired of AI crawlers reading my HTML in plain text while robots.txt did nothing.The core trick: shuffle characters and words in your HTML using a seed, then use CSS (flexbox order, direction: rtl, unicode-bidi) to put them back visually. Browser renders perfectly. textContent returns garbage.On top of that: email/phone RTL obfuscation with decoy characters, AI honeypots that inject prompt instructions into LLM scrapers, clipboard interception, canvas-based image rendering (no img src in DOM), robots.txt blocking 30+ AI crawlers, and forensic breadcrumbs to prove content theft.What it doesn't stop: headless browsers that execute CSS, screenshot+OCR, or anyone determined enough to reverse-engineer the ordering. I put this in the README's threat model because I'd rather say it myself than have someone else say it for me. The realistic goal is raising the cost of scraping -- most bots use simple HTTP requests, and we make that useless.TypeScript, Bun, tsup, React 18+. 162 tests. MIT licensed. Nothing to sell -- the SDK is free and complete.Best way to understand it: open DevTools on the site and inspect the text.GitHub: https://github.com/obscrd/obscrd

HN · launched Mar 12, 2026 · 16 upvotes (top 30%) · 0 views

Niche: developer utility tools · 561 launches, 8 in the last 7 days ▼ -73% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Security
  • Dev tools
  • Developer
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Yes The core technique relies on standard React DOM manipulation, CSS ordering properties (flex order, bidi), and simple string shuffle logic with a seed.

Discussion

20 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: curl + cheerio, screenshot-based scraping, Claude (for decoding HTML)

Concerns raised: Breaks screen readers and keyboard navigation (accessibility conflict), Bots can use screenshots to scrape text anyway, Static obfuscation can be reverse-engineered with LLMs, Creates worse user experience than bot resistance value, Semantic watermarking doesn't survive LLM rephrasing

Feature requests: Better TalkBack (Android screen reader) support, Text rendering in DOM that doesn't exist as readable static text (v2), Paraphrase-resistant semantic watermarking

Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 281 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #113 of 282 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 131 days after the earliest competitor.

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