Scraper bots revealed by scroll burstiness, 73% accuracy
Detecting scraper bots through scroll behaviour
A blog post by Niki.cat applies burstiness and memory coefficients to JavaScript scroll events, finding human scroll patterns are bursty with near-zero memory, unlike bots. A LightGBM model using only these two features classified single-page interactions with 73.4% accuracy, mainly confusing humans with ChatGPT Agent due to small dataset. The approach shows promise for content-heavy sites.
Scroll behaviour seems to be a relevant data point for distinguishing bots from humans, and Burstiness and Memory have proven to have predictive power in a controlled environment.