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Making scraping harder definitely reduces scraping. Some bad actors will get through, but others will be deterred. I think you might not understand that it's s

by dannyw 5y ago

Making scraping harder definitely reduces scraping. Some bad actors will get through, but others will be deterred. I think you might not understand that it's site owners like me who want to stop scraping. It usually comes from specific bad incidents, like copycat sites stealing our content and work. Cloudflare wouldn't block scraping if website owners didn't want it. And website owners can easily disable this protection.

SXX 5y ago
Scrapping protection is not a problem: defaults that CloudFlare promote are. Saying that website owners can disable it is akin saying website owners should go and whitelist Tor nodes. Most of website owners don't understand either of issues and they never gonna opt-out. Also I'm talking from experience because I been on both sides of the fence: doing scrapping and implementing protection. So yeah your CloudFlare protection will deter 10% of bad actors, but will also cut off 99% of enthusiast / research efforts or users of niche software or browsers. Still anyone with $1000+ budget will scrap whatever they want.