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I'm surprised that people are scraping their content via bots, given that it's licensed under CC and freely available to download. (http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/cc-wiki-dump/)

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I'm guessing that these are people who either want something more up to date than the data dump (which is monthly if if I recall) or who have scraping infrastructure set up and working and it's easier to use that than to work with the schema.

It's bi-monthly nowadays. Even so, you can use the API instead, its there for a reason.

Its too bad for this guy that he simply can't access SO the normal way, but that's not SO's fault

I agree. SO is great but we all need to be realistic about situations where for one reason or another we're edge cases.

I'm a bit surprised they just block the adresses, nor rate-limiting them.

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