@dressupgeekout
If you haven't tried it yet, there are regularly updated blocklists for many webservers available here:
https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt
I have this on my webserver and I can see from the logs that the server is responding with a few thousand 403s every day to crawlers and bots, so it's helping a bit at least.
@dressupgeekout
It's infuriating. And there is no guarantee that this will keep them out as they are actively working on finding ways around blocks. But at least we can make it a little harder. Anubis is good, but has the downside that it annoys the users too, and sometimes even makes the site inaccessible, which is too much collateral damage for me.
Anyway, good luck implementing it, I hope it helps a little!