[halb]

What kind of websites do you have in mind when I talk about fraud patterns? not everything is a static website, and I absolutely agree with you on that point: If your static website is struggling under the load of a scraper there is something deeply wrong with your architecture. We live in wonderful times, Nginx on my 2015 laptop can gracefully handle 10k Requests per second before I even activate ratelimiting.

Unfortunately there are bad people out there, and they know how to write code. Take a look at popular websites like TikTok, amazon, or facebook. They are inundated by fraud requests whose goal is to use their services in a way that is harmful to others, or straight up illegal. From spam to money laundering. On social medial, bots impersonate people in an attempt to influence public discourse and undermine democracies.

[DamonHD]

I run simple static sites from a (small) off-grid server at home. It has plenty of capacity for normal use, but cannot fully handle the huge traffic overshoots that bots and DoSes and poorly-written systems of household-name-multinationals inflict. I should not have to pay/scale to over-provision by an order of magnitude or more to stop the bullies and overbearing/idle from hurting genuine users. Luckily some relatively simple but carefully considered rules shut out much of the bad traffic while hurting almost no legitimate human visitor that I can find. Nuance and local circumstances are everything. But that took some engineering time on my part, that I also should not have had to spend. Particularly in fending off the nominally-nice multinationals.