this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
1031 points (97.3% liked)
Lemmy Shitpost
26911 readers
2833 users here now
Welcome to Lemmy Shitpost. Here you can shitpost to your hearts content.
Anything and everything goes. Memes, Jokes, Vents and Banter. Though we still have to comply with lemmy.world instance rules. So behave!
Rules:
1. Be Respectful
Refrain from using harmful language pertaining to a protected characteristic: e.g. race, gender, sexuality, disability or religion.
Refrain from being argumentative when responding or commenting to posts/replies. Personal attacks are not welcome here.
...
2. No Illegal Content
Content that violates the law. Any post/comment found to be in breach of common law will be removed and given to the authorities if required.
That means:
-No promoting violence/threats against any individuals
-No CSA content or Revenge Porn
-No sharing private/personal information (Doxxing)
...
3. No Spam
Posting the same post, no matter the intent is against the rules.
-If you have posted content, please refrain from re-posting said content within this community.
-Do not spam posts with intent to harass, annoy, bully, advertise, scam or harm this community.
-No posting Scams/Advertisements/Phishing Links/IP Grabbers
-No Bots, Bots will be banned from the community.
...
4. No Porn/Explicit
Content
-Do not post explicit content. Lemmy.World is not the instance for NSFW content.
-Do not post Gore or Shock Content.
...
5. No Enciting Harassment,
Brigading, Doxxing or Witch Hunts
-Do not Brigade other Communities
-No calls to action against other communities/users within Lemmy or outside of Lemmy.
-No Witch Hunts against users/communities.
-No content that harasses members within or outside of the community.
...
6. NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that is NSFW should be behind NSFW tags.
-Content that might be distressing should be kept behind NSFW tags.
...
If you see content that is a breach of the rules, please flag and report the comment and a moderator will take action where they can.
Also check out:
Partnered Communities:
1.Memes
10.LinuxMemes (Linux themed memes)
Reach out to
All communities included on the sidebar are to be made in compliance with the instance rules. Striker
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Sorry, I'm ignorant in this matter. Why exactly would you want to scrape websites aside from collecting data for ML? What kind of irreplaceable API are you using? Someone please educate me here.
API might cost a lot of money for the amount of requests you want to send. API may not include some fields in the data you want. API is rate limited, scraping might not be. API requires agreement to usage terms, scraping does not (though the recent LinkedIn scraping case might weaken that argument.)
This kinda reminds me of pirating vs paying. Using api = you know it will always be the same structure and you will get the data you asked for. Otherwise you will be notified unless they version their api. There is usual good documentation. You can always ask for help.
Scraping = you need to scout the whole website yourself. you need to keep up to date with the the websites structure and to make sure they haven't added ways to block bots (scraping). Error handling is a lot more intense on your end, like missing content, hidden content, query for data. the website may not follow the same standards/structuree throughout the website so you need to have checks for when to use x to get y. The data may need multiple request because they do not show for example all the user settings on one page but in an api call they would or it is a ajax page and you need to run Javascript scripts and click on buttons that may change id, class or text info and they may load data when you do x with Javascript so you need to emulate the webpage.
So my guess is that scraping is used most often when you only need to fetch simple data structures and you are fine with cleaning up the data afterwards. Like all the text/images on a page, checking if a page has been updated or just save the whole page like wayback machine.
As someone who used to scrape government websites for a living (with permission from them cause they'd rather us break their single 100yr old server than give us a csv), I can confirm that maintaining scraping scripts is a huge pain in the ass.
Ooof, i am glad you don't have to do it anymore. I have a customer who is in the same situation. The company with the site were also ok with it (it was a running joke "this [bot] is our fastest user") but it was very sketchy because you had to login as someone to run the bot. thankfully did they always tell us when they made changes so we never had to be surprised.
My understanding is that the result of the LinkedIn case is that you can scrape data that you have permission to view but not to access data that you were not intended to. The end result that ClickWrap agreements are unenforceable.