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A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

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Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#481
post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When your reach the end of your journey across the sea of semantics and arrive at the shore of a lonely island, you can be king of it. Here, we are examining hosting costs.

I simply don’t get why a human using a browser and a human using a bot using wget to load a page are different for a hoster, from your point of view. My suspicion is that you did not read the great grand parent post before replying to it and are now engaging in evasive tactics in order not to answer this simple question.

> hosting costs

I think you missed that, in my last comment, and _in every word of the article_.

You insist on a semantic equivalence that straddles two disjoint behaviours which incur vastly different cost profiles on publishers.

Fishing with dynamite might be OK to feed a village, but when any twat can kill all the fish for a hundred metres in order to eat just one, then it's useful to draw a distinction.

People who refuse to acknowledge a pertinent distinction are called "obtuse". One possible cause is ideology. I don't think you're stupid, just motivated.

Re: A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

#482

> Then in November 2025, four thousand "visitors" showed up over a few days. Each visited exactly one page with a bounce rate of 99%. More telling was that they had no referrer. That's usually the easiest way I spot a bot. > And they were only crawling my fund pages (like this one, this one, and this one), which only 10% of real visitors ever touch. > But those 4,000 bots were just the warm-up. I just hate this style…

I write a lot of my comments and emails like this. It’s a learned habit - I’m more apt to receive a thoughtful reply (or any) in this format.

But consider how many thoughtful replies you receive because reading your broken up messages sucks as an experience.
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