Maybe theymos has intentionally blacklisted such bots to put a hold on account trading?
People are farming accounts and this forum is turning into a spammers hub.
I won't be surprised if this turns out to be true.
Certainly not, more due to the easing website functioning,
we are constantly dealing with difficulties accessing website for a large number of browsing people.
I don't think a single crawler was putting any load on the servers.I think the website used to analyse accounts by stacking the queries, one by one(correct me if I am wrong).
So, it won't make any difference to the performance if it is blocked or not.
Probably, account farming is the main reason for this.