Update 3: After about a day - they expanded their pool of IPs to more than 2k new ones.
I blocked what I could and then I blocked the whole country (Russia) behind a CloudFlare javasript challenge (so that any legit traffic that wanted to pass it - could).
Everything stayed blocked for about a day and now it seems they gave up:
- all domains that pulled dynamic content from my site now show some other content and do not try to scrape Next Episode
- all static domains that delivered the cached version of the Next Episode homepage now deliver some other website(s)
- CloudFlare shows no further traffic on the firewall rules I've set (so the bots from those IPs are, for now, gone)
As this post is relatively old now (more than 3 days) I doubt many people will go back and check for new developments, but I wanted to give this the proper closure and let you know of the apparent happy end.
I blocked what I could and then I blocked the whole country (Russia) behind a CloudFlare javasript challenge (so that any legit traffic that wanted to pass it - could).
Everything stayed blocked for about a day and now it seems they gave up:
- all domains that pulled dynamic content from my site now show some other content and do not try to scrape Next Episode
- all static domains that delivered the cached version of the Next Episode homepage now deliver some other website(s)
- CloudFlare shows no further traffic on the firewall rules I've set (so the bots from those IPs are, for now, gone)
As this post is relatively old now (more than 3 days) I doubt many people will go back and check for new developments, but I wanted to give this the proper closure and let you know of the apparent happy end.