That's what it's for, isn't it? Make crawling slower and more expensive. Shitty crawlers not being able to run the PoW efficiently or at all is just a plus. Although:
> which is trivial for them, as the post explains
Sadly the site's being hugged to death right now so I can't really tell if I'm missing part of your argument here.
> figure out that they can simply remove "Mozilla" from their user-agent
And flag themselves in the logs to get separately blocked or rate limited. Servers win if malicious bots identify themselves again, and forcing them to change the user agent does that.
That's what it's for, isn't it? Make crawling slower and more expensive. Shitty crawlers not being able to run the PoW efficiently or at all is just a plus. Although:
> which is trivial for them, as the post explains
Sadly the site's being hugged to death right now so I can't really tell if I'm missing part of your argument here.
> figure out that they can simply remove "Mozilla" from their user-agent
And flag themselves in the logs to get separately blocked or rate limited. Servers win if malicious bots identify themselves again, and forcing them to change the user agent does that.