They’re already ignoring robots.txt, so I’m not sure why anyone would think they won’t just ignore this too. All they have to do is get a new IP and change their useragent.
Cloudflare is protecting a lot of sites from scraping with their POW captchas. They could allow people who pay
I have an idea. Why don’t I put a bunch of my website stuff in one place, say a pdf, and you screw heads just buy that? We’ll call it a “book”
How can I do this without Cloudflare?
Put a page on your website saying that scrapping your website costs [insert amount] and block the bots otherwise.
The hard part is reliably detecting the bots
Also you don’t want to block legit search engines that are not scraping your data for AI.
Again: hard to differentiate all those different bots, because you have to trust that they are what they say they are, and they often are not
Instead of blocking bots on user agent… I’m blocking full IP ranges: https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/619
It certainly can be a cat and mouse game, but scraping at scale tends to be ahead of the curve of the security teams. Some examples:
Preventing access by requiring an account, with strict access rules can curb the vast majority of scraping, then your only bad actors are the rich venture capitalists.
