It's hard to say. Did you ask the owners from the site? You shouldn't also forget that nowadays almost all sites contain advertisement, which is either the main reason for the site, or to help the site sustain itself.

Sure, your 12 hits a day won't have much impact. But what if it becomes common place? What if the majority of the people here used LWP to access perlmonks, decimating the ad hits?

I've written my share of LWP scripts, and I've written ad busting proxies. But I'm not convinced everything I did was ethical. I'd say it depends on the site, and the views of the owners of the site.

I don't think it's wrong for your script to pretend it's Netscape, but I do think it's wrong to ignore a robots.txt file. If the site would have a policy against automated harvesting, bypassing the policy would certainly be "wrong".

Abigail