I wouldn't call it massively unreliable from what I've seen so far.
For one it is offset by the fact that the site it is used on is Ajax'ed, so it is fairly simple to filter out those who poll just the container page and don't follow up with querying any actual content. For two, I'm getting good at detecting bots by simple filtering by User-agent strings and IPs. So it is far from the picture of an utter disaster that you describe.
For one it is offset by the fact that the site it is used on is Ajax'ed, so it is fairly simple to filter out those who poll just the container page and don't follow up with querying any actual content. For two, I'm getting good at detecting bots by simple filtering by User-agent strings and IPs. So it is far from the picture of an utter disaster that you describe.