I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage
Details
- External ID
- 47350252
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I built an SDK that scrambles HTML so scrapers get garbage
- Website domain
- obscrd.dev
- Launched
- March 12, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 16
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6968019680196802
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
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
Enrichment
- Theme
- browser automation and scraping for AI
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- sdk to obfuscate html and prevent scraping
- Manually corrected
- False
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 — 115 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #41 of 116 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 119 days after the earliest competitor.
- Stop AI scrapers from hammering your self-hosted blog (using porn) · hn · 2025-12-16 · 373 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Robust LLM extractor for websites in TypeScript · hn · 2026-03-26 · 72 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I made a tool that steals any website's UI into .md context · hn · 2026-01-05 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Trying to fix the web scraping industry's benchmark problem · hn · 2026-07-16 · 18 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- XHTML · hn · 2026-09-24 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Trawl · hn · 2026-03-08 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- TafScraper · ph · 2026-09-28 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Moat · ph · 2026-09-11 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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