I just saw a "how to stop feed scraping in 3 steps" post, and it's a simple - but mostly ineffective - answer to the problem. The answer given is to find the offending IP address in your logs, and then add a rewrite rule to send that IP away. There are two things that make that a less than optimal answer:

• Most bloggers don't have access to the HTTP server they are being hosted on
• Too many spammers have "farms" of IP addresses at their disposal

The second problem is the bigger one; trying to do blocking on individual IP addresses is a tiresome game of whack-a-mole, and - trust me - the bad actors have way, way more patience than you do.

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