The relentless crawl of LLM training bots has pushed website administrators into increasingly defensive postures. One prominent example emerged recently from the maintainer of Wandering Thoughts, a technical blog and wiki, who implemented a radical solution: blocking all HTTP requests bearing suspiciously generic User-Agent headers. This move directly targets the tsunami of automated traffic attributed partly to large language model (LLM) training data collection.

According to the site's public notice, the sheer volume of requests from poorly identified crawlers forced this experimental measure. The owner states unequivocally:

"All HTTP User-Agent headers should clearly identify what they are, and for non-browser user agents, they should identify not just the software involved but also who specifically is using that software. An extremely generic value such as 'Go-http-client/1.1' is not something that I consider acceptable any more."

This stance reflects a broader crisis. Indiscriminate scraping consumes significant server resources, driving up costs and potentially degrading performance for legitimate human users. The notice explicitly links the problem to the "plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training)". The Go-http-client/1.1 User-Agent is singled out as emblematic of the issue – a default identifier offering zero transparency about the crawler's purpose or operator.

Technical Implications for Developers & Operators:
1. Scraping Ethics Under Scrutiny: This incident underscores the growing backlash against opaque data harvesting. Developers building scrapers, especially for LLM training, face mounting pressure to implement ethical crawling practices. Transparent identification via the User-Agent string is now a baseline expectation, not a courtesy.
2. Resource Warfare: Small sites and personal blogs lack the infrastructure to absorb massive crawl traffic. Aggressive blocking becomes a necessary survival tactic, fragmenting web accessibility. Cloud costs for even moderately popular technical resources can become prohibitive under bot assault.
3. The Arms Race Escalates: As blocking based on User-Agent becomes more common, scrapers will likely evolve tactics – rotating User-Agents, mimicking browsers more closely, or distributing requests more widely. This forces defenders into more complex (and resource-intensive) mitigation strategies involving IP rate limiting, behavioral analysis, or CAPTCHAs.

This isn't merely about one blog's configuration file; it's a symptom of the deepening tension between the open web's ideals and the resource-intensive realities of modern AI development. The Wandering Thoughts blockade serves as a stark warning: the era of anonymous, high-volume scraping is ending, replaced by a landscape where data collection demands accountability. Developers and organizations involved in web scraping must now prioritize clear identification and respectful rate limiting, or risk finding their access revoked across an increasingly fortified internet.