Comment by flir

Personally I'm not trying to block the bots, I'm trying to avoid the bandwidth bill.

I've recently blocked everything that isn't offering a user agent. If it had only pulled text I probably wouldn't have cared, but it was pulling images as well (bot designers, take note - you can have orders of magnitude less impact if you skip the images).

For me personally, what's left isn't eating enough bandwidth for me to care, and I think any attempt to serve some bots is doomed to failure.

If I really, really hated chatbots (I don't), I'd look at approaches that poison the well.