High-performance .NET by example: Filtering bot traffic
Blocking access based on arbitrary user agent strings is a really bad idea. Every single bad bot will avoid known user agent strings or pretend to be Google, so you're only blocking well behaved ones. Plus there's thousands of browser versions out there, so there's a very good chance you're blocking some users for no reason.<p>The proper way to do this is to block by IP, based on behavior. Block IPs slowing down the site or throw up a captcha like cloudflare does.<p>Blocking bots sounds great but it just brings Google one step closer to a monopoly. Even good bots just pretend to be people nowadays because lots of people are implementing naive site protection strategies.<p>Edited: to be less mean