How can I do this without Cloudflare?
Put a page on your website saying that scrapping your website costs [insert amount] and block the bots otherwise.
The hard part is reliably detecting the bots
Also you don’t want to block legit search engines that are not scraping your data for AI.
Again: hard to differentiate all those different bots, because you have to trust that they are what they say they are, and they often are not
Instead of blocking bots on user agent… I’m blocking full IP ranges: https://gitlab.melroy.org/-/snippets/619
It certainly can be a cat and mouse game, but scraping at scale tends to be ahead of the curve of the security teams. Some examples:
Preventing access by requiring an account, with strict access rules can curb the vast majority of scraping, then your only bad actors are the rich venture capitalists.
I have an idea. Why don’t I put a bunch of my website stuff in one place, say a pdf, and you screw heads just buy that? We’ll call it a “book”
As someone who uses invidious daily I’ve always been of the belief if you don’t want something scraped, then maybe don’t upload it to a public web page/server.
Imagine a company that sells a lot of products online. Now imagine a scraping bot coming at peak sales hours and looking at each product list and page separately for said service. Now realise that some genuine users will have a worse buying experience because of that.
