Ban me at the IP level if you don't like me

I think a lot of really smart people are letting themselves get taken for a ride by the web scraping thing. Unless the bot activity is legitimately hammering your site and causing issues (not saying this isn't happening in some cases), then this mostly amounts to an ideological game of capture the flag. The difference being that you'll never find their flag. The only thing you win by playing is lost time.

The best way to mitigate the load from diffuse, unidentifiable, grey area participants is to have a fast and well engineered web product. This is good news, because your actual human customers would really enjoy this too.

My friend has a small public gitea instance, only use by him a a few friends. He's getting thousounds of requests an hour from bots. I'm sorry but even if it does not impact his service, at the very least it feels like harassment

> thousounds of requests an hour from bots

That's not much for any modern server so I genuinely don't understand the frustration. I'm pretty certain gitea should be able to handle thousands of read requests per minute (not per hour) without even breaking a sweat.

Serving file content/diff requests from gitea/forgejo is quite expensive computationally. And these bots tend to tarpit themselves when they come across eg. a Linux repo mirror.

https://social.hackerspace.pl/@q3k/114358881508370524