alt Hacker NewsJust curious, if you're tolerant of scraping, do you make an archive of all your content available so that scraping is unnecessary, and if so do the scrapers prefer that?
Replies
It's terabytes of content and other than we're the host not really related to each other. However, for most projects, it's possible to download a zip file of all the HTML docs for that project. We have a lower rate limit to pull these, but a scraper can pull thousands of docs at once. We only host a few hundred thousand projects so pulling a zip of the latest docs for all of them could be done in a day or two at a very reasonable rate.
It's also possible to request the docs already processed into markdown[1]. Lastly, basically all of the docs come from Git. A smart scraper could just clone a project's repo.
[1] https://docs.readthedocs.com/platform/stable/reference/markd...
Current evidence is that scrapers mostly aren't nearly considerate or sophisticated enough to take an "archive of all content" option if one exists.
See https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawlies which describes how the https://git.kernel.org gets hammered by crawlers all the time even though you could run a single `git clone` and get the data that way instead.