A respected technical blog administrator has drawn a line in the sand against the modern scourge of web scraping bots. The owner of "Wandering Thoughts" and its associated wiki, "CSpace", has implemented blocking rules targeting HTTP requests bearing generic or suspiciously unidentified User-Agent headers. This drastic measure is a direct response to what the admin describes as a "plague of high volume crawlers" overwhelming their site.

"Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that behave like this," states the site's block notice.

The core complaint centers on the lack of transparency and accountability in these crawlers. The admin explicitly states: "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." Generic identifiers like Go-http-client/1.1 are deemed unacceptable.

This action underscores several critical issues facing the open web:

  1. The LLM Data Hunger: The admin directly links the surge in aggressive crawling to the insatiable demand for training data by large language models (LLMs). This validates widespread concerns within the tech community about the largely unregulated scraping of public websites for AI development.
  2. Resource Drain: High-volume scraping imposes significant, often unsustainable, resource burdens (bandwidth, CPU) on independent websites and personal blogs not equipped to handle industrial-scale data extraction.
  3. The Ethics of Obfuscation: Using generic or misleading User-Agent strings allows crawlers to evade simple detection and blocking, raising ethical questions about the methods employed by entities gathering web data. It prevents site owners from making informed decisions about who accesses their content and for what purpose.
  4. The Right to Defend: This admin's stance is a practical assertion of a website owner's right to protect their infrastructure. Blocking based on User-Agent, while a blunt instrument, remains one of the few accessible first-line defenses for individuals and small operators against resource abuse.

While effective for the site owner, this approach highlights a fragmented and reactive web. It forces legitimate users with poorly configured tools or niche clients into the crossfire alongside malicious scrapers. The incident serves as a stark reminder that the burden of policing ethically dubious data harvesting practices is increasingly falling onto individual website operators, often with limited technical means, while the organizations benefiting from the scraped data operate with relative impunity. The escalating arms race between scrapers and defenders threatens the accessibility and openness the web was built upon.