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For my silly hobby sites I just return status 444 close the connection for anything that has case-insentive "bot" in the UA requesting anything other than robots.txt, humans.txt, favicon.ico, etc... This would also drop search engines but I blackhole route most of their CIDR blocks. I'm probably the only one here that would do this.





How does a bot scraping your silly hobby sites for any purpose harm or negatively affect you in any way?

Only if they push me over my bandwidth limits but they can't do that if I just drop them on the floor.

Depends if they hit a site enough to make it cost something. It's not hard for bots to flood servers.



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