alt Hacker NewsCloudflare are setting themselves up as the arbiter who will decide which requests are a) human, b) authorized AI bots, c) illicit/banned bots.
Given the number of people on HN who report massive problems from scrapers and other bots, it sounds like if Cloudflare doesn't do this, someone else will need to. I might have thought bandwidth was cheap enough now for it not to matter, but I guess the bots are costing some sites a lot of money.
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someonebaggy • today at 12:32 PM
Cloudflare doesn't block bots. It's trivial to use residential proxies and your very obvious bot will only get blocked maybe 5% of the time when using rotating IPs.
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Cloudflare seems to be very excited to eventually get a 30% cut on pay-to-crawl.
As for the bots, I thought the same thing, but it is indeed a huge problem. They've brought my websites down pretty frequently recently. I tried Cloudflare but visitors complained, and I think you can't win against the bots anyway, so I've resorted to performance improvements and serving every request.