[mootothemax]

Exactly. I’m constantly amazed at how little you actually need to bypass CF, Amazon, Azure WAFs and so on (Incapsula springs to mind too). When you look at the code you’ve come up with, it’s actually quite small and compact.

More to the point, these systems actually help scraping because proof of work unlocks essentially unlimited scraping, in my experience.

That said - from my experience on the other side, sure you can’t stop people like me or you, but you can stop 99% of the others. That’s more than worth it operationally.

[Chris2048]

What do you mean by ~"PoW unlocks unlimited scraping"?

[danielheath]

Usually after you solve the POW challenge, sites let you make a lot of requests before asking you to complete another.