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Comment by kerkeslager

2 days ago

Question: do these bots not respect robots.txt?

I haven't added these scrapers to my robots.txt on the sites I work on yet because I haven't seen any problems. I would run something like this on my own websites, but I can't see selling my clients on running this on their websites.

The websites I run generally have a honeypot page which is linked in the headers and disallowed to everyone in the robots.txt, and if an IP visits that page, they get added to a blocklist which simply drops their connections without response for 24 hours.

> The websites I run generally have a honeypot page which is linked in the headers and disallowed to everyone in the robots.txt, and if an IP visits that page, they get added to a blocklist which simply drops their connections without response for 24 hours.

I love this idea!

> Question: do these bots not respect robots.txt?

No they don't, because there is no potential legal liability for not respecting that file in most countries.