[matznerd]

Captchas don't do anything to stop bots, they just add a small additional cost(~$1.40 per 1000 solved). I am talking about monitoring things that 90% of bots generally do not take precautions against, like tracking mouse movements and other things I won't mention here, that distinguish them from humans.

[eli]

I don't believe you. At best you can obfuscate and confuse scrapers. You can't stop them from reading a public web page. (And I shudder to think what these solutions must do to accessibility -- hope you don't have any blind readers.)

[matznerd]

Oh, I wasn't saying you can completely stop them from reading a page or individual pages. But there is activity, than can be detected as irregular. Here is a true example I know about someone who wanted to scrape their competitor's client listings. The competitor had a map with points of their customers with random user IDs and no where was the entire dataset visible. The person just built a scraper/bot, to hit every single possible ID of over 10,000 numbers. They hit a ton of empty pages, and that company should have recognized an IP incrementally crawling their data, especially empty pages...This activity should have been recognized and resulted in an IP ban.