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Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

(boston.conman.org)
597 points classichasclass | 1 comments | 25 Aug 25 04:23 UTC | HN request time: 0.206s | source
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PeterStuer ◴[25 Aug 25 06:30 UTC] No.45010862[source]▶
FAFO from both sides. Not defending this bot at all. That said, the shenanigans some rogue or clueless webmasters are up to blocking legitimate and non intrusive or load causing M2M trafic is driving some projects into the arms of 'scrape services' that use far less considerate nor ethical means to get to the data you pay them for.

IP blocking is useless if your sources are hundreds of thousands of people worldwide just playing a "free" game on their phone that once in a while on wifi fetches some webpages in the background for the game publisher's scraping as a service side revenue deal.

replies(3): >>45011013 #>>45011442 #>>45011662 #
1. geocar ◴[25 Aug 25 08:04 UTC] No.45011442[source]▶
Exactly. If someone can harm your website on accident, they can absolutely harm it on purpose.

If you feel like you need to do anything at all, I would suggest treating it like any other denial-of-service vulnerability: Fix your server or your application. I can handle 100k clients on a single box, which equates to north of 8 billion daily impressions, and so I am happy to ignore bots and identify them offline in a way that doesn't reveal my methodologies any further than I absolutely have to.