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.
Theymos switched to Cloudflare and that's blocking basically all bots at this point in time. That's why the site is down now.