General Discussion • Re: wtf? almost every forum and website is on cloudflare now?

Image the site owner has made it clear to the perpetrator(s) that this usage is undesirable and against their wishes.

Why? A search engine will download your site once, but then it will show it to many people. Is that bad? Yes, I understand that maybe you created your site for other purposes, for example, for a small circle of friends, and you're not interested in expanding your audience. But overall, this is rather unusual. Search engines are beneficial for websites. I can also imagine that you don't use search engines yourself. That is, you don't use them at all, and it wouldn't bother you at all if every website on the internet decided to ban their indexing. But that's also unusual...

And, as I've already said, every bot is an embodiment of its creator. If anyone can access your site, it essentially makes no difference whether they do so by clicking links with their mouse or by setting up some automated process to do it for them.