UK Scraperz in da Hood

There really aren't too many truly persistent jerks out there and I hate to rat out sites or IPs unless I'm sure they are truly rotten but this wins the award for most annoying IP address of the year. I blocked 88.208.194.241 a long time ago and it just never stops, it's relentlessly attempting to crawl, day after day, asking for thousands of pages and doesn't fucking take NO! for an answer.

A quick reverse DNS on this idiot shows it's apparently on some UK server farm, possibly run by fasthosts.co.uk, that IDs itself as server88-208-194-241.live-servers.net.

Out of curiousity I went back and ran a reverse DNS on all my blocked IPs and big shock, this server farm has a few hits in my list.

server88-208-192-204.live-servers.net
server213-171-220-120.live-servers.net
server88-208-194-241.live-servers.net
server88-208-194-252.live-servers.net
server88-208-195-4.live-servers.net

Matter of fact, I just reviewed my logs for today and all of the 88.208.19* IPs listed above hit the server so it appears to be distributed scraping.

So I'm thinking it's probably not such a bad idea just to block their whole damn neighborhood based on the non-stop abuse I'm getting from a couple of these IPs.

I would block at a minimum:

88.208.192.0/24
88.208.194.0/24
88.208.195.0/24
213.171.220.0/24

I'd keep an eye out on anything from this range as well:

inetnum: 213.171.220.0 - 213.171.223.255
netname: FASTHOSTS-UK-NETWORK

They claim to resell dial-up and broadband otherwise I'd suggest blocking the whole damn network but at this point I'm not sure 100% if we're looking just at servers or surfers but so far blocking what I've blocked doesn't appear to have any negative impact on my site except to stop their stupid bots from downloading my content.

Let me know if anyone else is seeing activity from these guys and what IPs you're seeing as this is about as bad as I've seen and they need to be stopped.