From the mailing list
The site has been behaving badly today -- I suspect that the volume of
automated scrapers has gone up. There are some other sites that scrape
thousands of pages per day -- why, I don't know.
I'm starting to block them -- unfortunately, I have to wait for them to
cause problems and then add their IP address to the block list. If this
continues, then I'll probably move to some more adaptive scheme to
prevent these effective denial of service attacks (even though I doubt
that the attackers know that is what they are doing). There is one site
that has been blocked for *years* and is still trying to fetch tens of
thousands of pages per day.
Anyway, sorry.
Philip
