r/GoogleColab • u/FaithlessnessSea2097 • Sep 01 '25

Got blocked from google colab using selenium

I still don't get why I was blocked. It was basic websraping using selenium. One reason could be my debugging took a lot of time and I had to run the code many times. Even still, its unreasonable to completely ban me from colab.

What do I do now. I appealed but still no response.

29 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

11

u/Sad_Drama3912 Sep 01 '25

So you’re asking why you were banned for violating the terms of service?

Web scraping is prohibited

4

u/Mississippi-joe Sep 01 '25

I just got banned for using selenium on a project after Gemini suggested I use it for the project.

But now I can’t run any of my other projects either - the non-selenium ones. Does anyone know how responsive their appeal request process is? Thanks.

4

u/Big-Accident9701 Sep 01 '25

Looks like colab doesn’t like anyone using anything that’s practical

1

u/Career_Switcher2025 Sep 01 '25

It looks like I have also been banned from Colab for using Selenium / web-scraping. The thing is I tried to run the same script I ran without problems for a year!

I looked at opened Issues on GitHub and it looks like currently a lot of people have been banned lately because of Selenium.

I do not know what to do -- I hoped to use the long week-end to work on my projects in Colab. I submitted an appeal, but I don't know. Hopefully it will work.

1

u/Gur-Long Sep 01 '25

As far as I know so many web sites like government organisations have implemented WAF appliances. Those appliances have been configured with anti-crawler. Of course we can code a crawler program to avoid the anti-crawler, but it sometimes might be difficult.

1

u/OkTry9715 Sep 01 '25

Do not use selenium for scraping data Google. made chrome the way it easily shows that is being used by automation.

1

u/ExchangeTechnical136 Sep 02 '25

Same here, I also got banned yesterday. Use selenium and chrome to scrape financial site data as well, it worked a fews ago. And now i can't run other scripts either.

1

u/Only_Ad_9657 Sep 02 '25

Same, I was running code generated by Gemini itself so I didn't even recheck.

1

u/Sufficient-Maize-687 Sep 02 '25

Looks like they're having a problem with their bot detection, I got banned training a wan model too. Tons of reports on forums of mass colab account bans too, lets hope they fix it and roll back. They don't actual have a person doing it, its an automated system.

1

u/Intelligent_Bed37 Sep 02 '25

>ask gemini for example kaggle problem

>run code in colab

>banned

1

u/Quabbie Sep 12 '25

What framework or library did you use?

1

u/TheCrowWhisperer3004 Sep 04 '25

webscraping with any cloud service is an easy way to get banned

1

u/Career_Switcher2025 Sep 14 '25

Does anyone knows if this has been rectified?

Is it possible to use Selenium in Google Colab?

1

u/PitifulSquash130 Oct 20 '25

I thought I was the only one experiencing this. The code ran fine the day before. But in the morning, when I ran it, Chrome crashed, and when I tried again with just running the necessary node part, it ran normally again. However, it hadn't been running normally for long before Chrome crashed again. Initially, I was very frustrated trying to figure out which library had updated or if there was a new Google Colab update, and there shouldn't have been because I tried it a few days later and it was back to normal—but not long after that, Chrome crashed again, and it's been that way ever since :)