> For a business, blocking some of your paying customers isn't acceptable.
replyThat depends on your business and the costs you're incurring from the bots. It might be justifiable to lose 0.1% of your customers if it means saving server costs from serving useless bot traffic.
I suppose it would depend, yeah. I find having paying customers being blocked to be completely unacceptable. Not only is a bad customer experience, but they tend to be very vocal about it. Posting online, leaving bad reviews, etc.
replyHaving to serve 1000x more traffic from bots is completely unacceptable for most site owners as well.
replyThe fact that this trade-off isn't obvious indicates you haven't tried to run a site at scale and make a living off of it.
You are quite incorrect. I make a living off a website and 99.9% of my traffic is from bots. Literally hundreds of millions of requests from bots. The cost of bots is worth the cost of not harming legit users.
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