>If you write a crawler, you probably don't want it to waste time indexing a list of articles in every possible sort order, trying all "reply" buttons, things like that.
On the other hand, many websites (like wikipedia here) hide interesting pages behind a Disallow.
If you write a crawler, you probably don't want it to waste time indexing a list of articles in every possible sort order, trying all "reply" buttons, things like that.
For me, a "Disallow" line in robots.txt means "don't bother, nothing interesting here". It is a suggestion that benefits everyone when followed, not an access control list.