Thread: stopping heavy downloaders

I've been hit lately with heavy downloaders of my content, I check my logs and some IPs are downloading 1 or two gigabytes a day, obviously scrapers. Anyone know of a good technique to stop this? I was thinking a script activated by cron every half hour that checks the end of the apache log file and bans IPs based on downloaded data, allowing Google, MSN and Yahoo IPs obviously. Anyone know of anything like this or better?

are you sure it's not any of the bots from google or yahoo?

nah, i checked the ips. google and yahoo always have a reverse lookup, im nearly sure. and the ips are downoading media files, google and yahoo dont download them

What UserAgent are they using?

Nice collection of ringtones you have on your site Georgie. I wonder where they've come from...? Oh wait, you've scraped every single on of them from other websites and you have the audacity to moan that you're now being scraped.

Why not explain to everyone here how you're actively (like, right now) scraping a certain few sites of currently no less than 150,000 mp3 files, and counting.

I suggest you quit doing stuff that you don't like done to yourself, or you'll just face more problems.