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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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I use a tool that downloads a website to check for new chapters of series every day, then creates an RSS feed with the contents. Would this be considered a harmful scraper?
The problem with AI scrapers and bots is their scale, thousands of requests to webpages that the internal server cannot handle, resulting in slow traffic.
Does your tool respect the site’s robots.txt?
Unfortunately, robots.txt cannot express rate limits, so it would be an overly blunt instrument for things like GP describes. HTTP 429 would be a better fit.
Crawl-delayis just that, a simple directive to add to robots.txt to set the maximum crawl frequency. It used to be widely followed by all but the worst crawlers ...It's a nonstandard extension without consistent semantics or wide support, but I suppose it's good to know about anyway. Thanks for mentioning it.
I was responding to their question if scraping the site is considered harmful. I would say as long as they are not ignoring robots they shouldn’t be contributing significant amounts of traffic if they’re really only pulling data once a day.
Yes, it just downloads the HTML of one page and formats the data into the RSS format with only the information I need.
Seems like an api request would be preferable for the site you’re checking. I don’t imagine they’re unhappy with the traffic if they haven’t blocked it yet
I mean if it's cms site there may not be an api, this would be the only solution in that case