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by bradly14 hours ago |
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upvoteby dhx3 hours ago|
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robots.txt was only intended to help search index crawlers not get stuck in endless crawl loops for badly designed websites.

What you suggest is explicitly not a purpose of robots.txt per RFC9309[1]:

"These rules are not a form of access authorization."

HTTP 429 and HTTP 403 are what servers are meant to return to clients to slow them down or tell them to stop doing something without having first gained authorisation.

[1] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9309#section-1

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upvoteby bityard11 hours ago|
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robots.txt applies (or should, in my opinion) to anything that automatically follows a link. Basically any software that is not a human-controlled web browser or single-shot curl command. Everything else: robot.
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upvoteby xena13 hours ago|
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AI bros think they should be exempt from robots.txt. Administrators of big services beg to differ. No solid consensus has arisen. I bet it's gonna take a lawsuit or two to see how it shakes out.
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upvoteby ghaff11 hours ago|
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From the start, robots.txt has always been an indicator of a site's preference with no actual legal significance.
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upvoteby Dylan1680710 hours ago|
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wget ignores robots.txt outside of recursive mode. I think it's correct to do so, and I think an AI loading a handful of pages in response to a command should be about the same.
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upvoteby recursive11 hours ago|
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If a new directive was introduced that allows for an explicit setting in robots.txt, do you think the bros would follow it anyway? Something like `ALLOW AGENTS` or `DISALLOW AGENTS`
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upvoteby TeMPOraL25 minutes ago|
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The "Bros"? Maybe.

I wouldn't want them to. The whole point of using agents to do stuff on the web for me, is for them to do the stuff on the web for me.

This is the reverse of "do not track" case. It'll not be effective because every service will set it to DISALLOW by default anyway, because it costs them nothing, and for most services, it actually is what they want anyway - most of businesses on the web are making money on wasting people's time, and for that, they need to force themselves on people; end-user automation defeats that, so they actively fight it (and complain a lot).

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