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I prefer the approach of an algorithmic challenge that forces the "new visitor" to spend some CPU cycles.

It's a clear process, doesn't involve privacy risks or strange sneaky games, and tends to fail in ways that a human can at least see and report, as opposed to mysterious outages.




.. and also annoys people with slow hardware while costing very little to serious scrapers?

How much CPU time can you burn so people on 3 year old phones can see it, and how much will it cost scrapers?


Even a very slight challenge is a problem for scrapers: they have to do it far more frequently.

Its better than captchas and whatever Cloudflare does in terms of overall nuisance.




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