IP address blacklists can be effective, and certainly make a lot more sense than blocking anything that doesn't appear on a whitelist.
Depending on how you are presenting the data, you might also find it helpful to impose a rate limit (accept only a certain number of requests from a particular IP address within a given timeframe).
Re:Ask HN: Should you block web scrapers?
by jorgecurio on Monday February 01, 2016 @10:43PM
(#11017532)
if there was a public API that you could cross reference IP from your website that you suspect as a bot, would you use it? Would you pay for that kind of API?
Of course I would start off by ironically scraping proxies from public domain as those are often used. Not sure what else determined scrapers use to get data, but it's safe to say that 98% of scrapers are trying to pay as little money as possible and often complain when a scraper gets blocked...fuck these people seriously
Is it any beneficial if there's a way to detect if a given IP address is bad or not right from the get go? Possibly by searching through millions of IP addresses that are blacklisted through a bloom filter and REST API? Do you think this would help-> a long roster of abusive IP address databases?