Topic: RYM doesn't like scraping... keep doing it lmao

Deleted Account · 2024-06-04T03:35:26.027875+02:00

https://rym.fm/discussion/rate-your-music/site-issues/212/#post9683818 It seems they're trying super duper hard to prevent web scrapers, despite the fact that the vast majority of scraping is not only harmless, but pretty much a good thing for the preservation of the internet. This comes at a huge cost the usability of the site and negatively impacts most users, many of whom are sick of the annoyingly aggressive firewall on their site and painstakingly frequent captchas, IP blocks and VPN bans. Like they're creating many serious problems for pretty much no reason other than ego. I am annoyed at how many Wayback Machine pages only captured an IP block. Like that's being a terrible sport and kind of straight up tyrannical, eg "erasing" the history of the site (for instance I wanted to see how progressive death metal looked like the site before it was deleted but the archived page is an IP blocked), and in theory the admins can hide whatever sketchy shit they've done in past if it can't be archived. I want to see what really happened to progressive death metal how it was SO bad they had to create new site rules to justify its deletion, which is now hidden behind an IP block on the archival databases. For this reason, keep scrapping the site with your RYMbot. Knowing how many systems they have in place to protect their ego makes it that much funnier that your innocent little bot is still scraping info from the site. I am not usually a fan of these bots because they're kind of just noise imo, but just to spite RYM's terrible moderatation and administration, I say it's worth keeping lol Like the power tripping admins there put so much effort and money into making the site a worse experience for human users to prevent bots from accessing it, yet your little bot gets away with it and I find that ironic and approve of this bot's function :) Edit: Yikes, now they're apparently requiring sign-in to even view their forums. aye aye aye they really hate bots and archives, don't they? Egomaniacs...

Posted

by Deleted Account

anonymous user	posted , edited
anonymous user	https://rym.fm/discussion/rate-your-music/site-issues/212/#post_9683818 It seems they're trying super duper hard to prevent web scrapers, despite the fact that the vast majority of scraping is not only harmless, but pretty much a good thing for the preservation of the internet. This comes at a huge cost the usability of the site and negatively impacts most users, many of whom are sick of the annoyingly aggressive firewall on their site and painstakingly frequent captchas, IP blocks and VPN bans. Like they're creating many serious problems for pretty much no reason other than ego. I am annoyed at how many Wayback Machine pages only captured an IP block. Like that's being a terrible sport and kind of straight up tyrannical, eg "erasing" the history of the site (for instance I wanted to see how progressive death metal looked like the site before it was deleted but the archived page is an IP blocked), and in theory the admins can hide whatever sketchy shit they've done in past if it can't be archived. I want to see what really happened to progressive death metal how it was SO bad they had to create new site rules to justify its deletion, which is now hidden behind an IP block on the archival databases. For this reason, keep scrapping the site with your RYMbot. Knowing how many systems they have in place to protect their ego makes it that much funnier that your innocent little bot is still scraping info from the site. I am not usually a fan of these bots because they're kind of just noise imo, but just to spite RYM's terrible moderatation and administration, I say it's worth keeping lol Like the power tripping admins there put so much effort and money into making the site a worse experience for human users to prevent bots from accessing it, yet your little bot gets away with it and I find that ironic and approve of this bot's function :) Edit: Yikes, now they're apparently requiring sign-in to even view their forums. aye aye aye they really hate bots and archives, don't they? Egomaniacs...
anonymous user	posted , edited
anonymous user	Essentially every IP address I can use right now is blocked from their site, VPN or not and like I can't even use the site at all. It's fucking ridiculous. Like I thought they were protecting against something serious like DDoS attacks or hackers trying to steal payment information... but this is for, um, data scraping? That's it? What a joke, it's pitiful, even that they would make their site unusable with aggressive Cloudflaring on top of a super sensitive firewall on top of ReCaptcha, and their own proprietary captcha... because they don't want a bot to cross reference tags on the site? Insanity imo. And then they have the audacity to deploy ad/script-blocking detection software on top of everything, as if they want to "scrape" as much information from me, the user, as possible. Is there even an iota of privacy on this site? Edit: After half an hour of trying I got on through a Netherlands-based server on some super obscure VPN, but still.
Mike joined	posted
Mike joined	They are really paranoid about it. Fortunately the rymBot does not do ordinary web scraping. The intention is not to create a clone of the rym website, but to get some inspiration from the releases trending there.

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