There’s a fundamental difference between blocking potentially harmful access attempts (e.g. bad bots) and blocking undesired traffic hogs (e.g. site rippers).
Bad Behavior does a very good job on the first point; on the second, you could go, for example, either of these two routes:
- Edit the
blacklist.inc.php file and add your unwanted UAs there;
- Edit or create a
.htaccess file with the UAs you don’t want.
However.
Keep in mind that you are blocking traffic based on the user agent (UA) that is reported by the visitor; if someone were really to set out to overload your server with traffic (and/or drain your bandwidth) it’s not at all hard to spoof a UA to bypass your blocks.
Bottom line: it’s annoying as heck to regulrly have critters who waste your precious bandwidth, but in the end, it’s a matter of balancing what you have (your means) with what you want. Often, simple solutions applied jointly give an adequate level of protection, with the added benefit of relative simplicity (at least you know where to look if you mess up).
Things like anti-hotlinking (by protecting images and other media files, css and js files, etc.) are simple measures, that can be easily applied to your root .htaccess file.
Just don’t think that you can cover all your bases, and certainly not completely – someone out to harm your site with the appropriate skills and determination will get through, eventually.
Unless, of course, your angle really is intellectual property protection (again: you can either go with Bad Behavior or follow the .htaccess method for that – your call) site-rippers are in my opinion small fry, compared to others in the nasty jungle out there.
