Having spent a week battling a particularly inconsiderate scraping attempt, I’m quite unsurprised by the juvenile tone and fairly glib approach to the ethics of bots/scraping presented by the piece.
For the site I work for, about 20-30% of our monthly hosting costs go towards servicing bot/scraping traffic. We’ve generally priced this into the cost of doing business, as we’ve prioritised making our site as freely accessible as possible.
But after this week, where some amateur did real damage to us with a ham-fisted attempt to scrape too much too quickly, we’re forced to degrade the experience for ALL users by introducing captchas and other techniques we’d really rather not.
For the site I work for, about 20-30% of our monthly hosting costs go towards servicing bot/scraping traffic. We’ve generally priced this into the cost of doing business, as we’ve prioritised making our site as freely accessible as possible.
But after this week, where some amateur did real damage to us with a ham-fisted attempt to scrape too much too quickly, we’re forced to degrade the experience for ALL users by introducing captchas and other techniques we’d really rather not.