"It's just that some greedy companies are writing incredibly shitty crawlers that don't follow any of the enstablished [sic] conventions (respecting robots.txt, using proper UA string, rate limiting, whatever)."
How does "proper UA string" solve this "blowing up websites" problem
The only thing that matters with respect to the "blowing up websites" problem is rate-limiting, i.e., behaviour
"Shitty crawlers" are a nuisance because of their behaviour, i.e., request rate, not because of whatever UA string they send; the behaviour is what is "shitty" not the UA string. The two are not necessarily correlated and any heuristic that naively assumes so is inviting failure
"Spoofed" UA strings have been facilitated and expected since the earliest web browsers
For example,
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic/mas...
To borrow the parent's phrasing, the "blowing up websites" problem has nothing to do with UA string specifically
It may have something to do with website operator reluctance to set up rate-limiting though; this despite widespread impelementation of "web APIs" that use rate-limiting
NB. I'm not suggesting rate-limiting is a silver bullet. I'm suggesting that without rate-limiting, UA string as a means of addressing the "blowing up websites" problem is inviting failure
How does "proper UA string" solve this "blowing up websites" problem
The only thing that matters with respect to the "blowing up websites" problem is rate-limiting, i.e., behaviour
"Shitty crawlers" are a nuisance because of their behaviour, i.e., request rate, not because of whatever UA string they send; the behaviour is what is "shitty" not the UA string. The two are not necessarily correlated and any heuristic that naively assumes so is inviting failure
"Spoofed" UA strings have been facilitated and expected since the earliest web browsers
For example,
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/alandipert/ncsa-mosaic/mas...
To borrow the parent's phrasing, the "blowing up websites" problem has nothing to do with UA string specifically
It may have something to do with website operator reluctance to set up rate-limiting though; this despite widespread impelementation of "web APIs" that use rate-limiting
NB. I'm not suggesting rate-limiting is a silver bullet. I'm suggesting that without rate-limiting, UA string as a means of addressing the "blowing up websites" problem is inviting failure