Lemmy newb here, not sure if this is right for this /c.

An article I found from someone who hosts their own website and micro-social network, and their experience with web-scraping robots who refuse to respect robots.txt, and how they deal with them.

  • tripflag@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    and filtering malicious traffic is more important to me than you visiting my services, so I guess that makes us even :-)

      • El Barto@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        You had me until the “ethically sound position” part.

        You’re saying that Joe Blogger is acting unethically because he doesn’t allow VPN users to visit his site. C’mon, brother.

      • tripflag@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Absolutely; if I was a company, or hosting something important, or something that was intended for the general public, then I’d agree.

        But I’m just an idiot hosting whimsical stuff from my basement, and 99% of it is only of interest for my friends. I know ~everyone in my target audience, and I know that none of them use a VPN for general-purpose browsing.

        As it is, I don’t mind keeping the door open to the general public, but nothing of value will be lost if I need to pull the plug on some more ASN’s to preserve my bandwidth. For example when a guy hopping through a VPN in Sweden decides to download the same zip file thousands of times, wasting terabytes of traffic over a few hours (this happened a week ago).