Exactly, some of us use scrapers because while we can't go full Richard Stallman, we also don't want to visually sift through ridiculous UI just to look at some basic data/text.
Re:Scrape like the big boys
by matheusmoreira on Friday November 05, 2021 @08:25PM
(#29126198)
> we also don't want to visually sift through ridiculous UI just to look at some basic data/text
Yeah.
First scraper I ever built was for my school portal. Absolutely atrocious user interface. It got to the point that I seriously hated that site so I built a script to log into it and download my information. I just wanted to see my grades without suffering.
Not everybody in this space is out to destroy your site. Some of us actively try to put as little load on your site as possible. My scraper puts less load on sites than I do when I browse them normally, I've measured it. Really sucks when we get lumped together with the other abusers and blocked.