@m0xEE @eric @jae @RedTechEngineer @p @sendpaws @slipgate
>computing resources
Again, if your whole stack falls apart when randos start knocking on your search API or whatever, you architected it badly. Implement caching and rate-limiting that isn't based solely on single IPs; you have whole CDNs in front of your servers, use them. That's how you build resilient networks.

And if you run a site and are a single admin, then first of all, congrats that you gained enough attention for scrapers to notice, and secondly if the simple methods that don't hurt anyone I wrote above failed, then we can talk about implementing PoW. But by that time, we are talking maybe about 5% of sites that currently have it, might actually need a WAF in front.

If my small FranVM that hosted Pleroma and another ~50GB of git mirrors on IDE-tier slabs and handled that Chinese scraper traffic mostly without issues before I implemented any measures, then most competent people should be able to do the same. All I'm trying to say that hiding everything behind PoW challenges is 95% of the time an actual skill issue and nothing. Sometimes a time issue.