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

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.

> 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.

That's traffic I want to block, and that's behaviour that I want to punish / discourage. If a set of users get caught up in that, even when they've just been given recycled IP addresses, then there's more chance to bring the shitty 'scraping as a service' behaviour to light, thus to hopefully disinfect it.

(opinion coming from someone definitely NOT hosting public information that must be accessible by the common populace - that's an issue requiring more nuance, but luckily has public funding behind it to develop nuanced solutions - and can just block China and Russia if it's serving a common populace outside of China and Russia).