Ask HN: Should you block web scrapers?

Post by ldjb » Mon, Feb 01, 2016, 11:25 PM UTC

jorgecurio wrote: post #10

ldjb wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some examples are Lynx, Iceweasel, Chromium, Steam's in-game browser and the Nintendo 3DS browser. Okay, none of them are that obscure but they probably aren't the first things that spring to mind when you think of browsers. Depending on your method of blocking browsers, it might automatically lump Iceweasel together with Firefox and Chromium together with Chrome. But if this is something you really want to do, you h…

so it seems like the only sure-fire way of detecting bad bots is via an IP address and not relying on Browser Agent. Is it any beneficial if there's a way to detect if a given IP address is bad or not right from the get go? Possibly by searching through millions of IP addresses that are blacklisted through a bloom filter and REST API? Do you think this would help-> a long roster of abusive IP address databases?

Post by ldjb » Tue, Feb 02, 2016, 2:31 PM UTC

jorgecurio wrote: post #12

ldjb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IP address blacklists can be effective, and certainly make a lot more sense than blocking anything that doesn't appear on a whitelist. Depending on how you are presenting the data, you might also find it helpful to impose a rate limit (accept only a certain number of requests from a particular IP address within a given timeframe).

if there was a public API that you could cross reference IP from your website that you suspect as a bot, would you use it? Would you pay for that kind of API? Of course I would start off by ironically scraping proxies from public domain as those are often used. Not sure what else determined scrapers use to get data, but it's safe to say that 98% of scrapers are trying to pay as little money as possible and often comp…