Seogrump talks about LLMs and gopher, and asks if the AI bots are
scraping gopher sites [0].

I suppose they could be. But I haven't seen any behavior in my logs
that indicates AI scrapers directly making requests to port 70,
which I'm thinking means rapid-fire connections from lots of
different IPs. I also think it would be difficult for such scrapers
to get meaningful data back on gopher, just due to the fact that a
lot of servers are on older hardware, or self-hosted, and that the
gopher protocol itself is not optimized for performance. I imagine
some older gopher servers (or the parent host) would just fall over
after a few minutes of request flooding. I'd be curious to hear if
other self-hosted gopher server admins have noticed anything like
this direct to port 70.

That said, it looks like there have been AI or at least search bots
that have found the floodgap gopher proxy (and some have been
blocked) [1], and I'm sure other web-to-gopher proxies facilitate
bot access to gopher. Still, I think such access is accidental and
not meant to target gopher, although the end result is the same.

I'd be fine with no web-to-gopher proxies at all. I think gopher
should exist on its own and we should encourage the use of dedicated
gopher clients, but I do understand the convenience aspect of a
proxy, particularly its use in tools like the overbite-wx firefox
plugin.

[0]: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/seogrump/phlog/20250514-llms-and-gopher.txt
[1]: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/responsible-bot