Some good answers in the stuff others have posted (Especially the accessibility one). You don't provide many details of what you do and do not have at your dis

Some good answers in the stuff others have posted (Especially the accessibility one). You don't provide many details of what you do and do not have at your disposal in terms of skills, tech stack, access to log files etc so this is a non-expert cut and paste from SO [1]. Yeah I know (StackOverflow) and it doesn't even relate directly to your problem ....But if you read the long bit below it might give you a bit of blue-sky thinking. >> The next is determining what behavior constitutes a possible bot. For your stackoverflow example, it would be perhaps a _certain number of page loads in a given small time frame from a single user (not just IP based, but perhaps user agent, source port, etc.)_ Next, you build the engine that contains these rules, collects tracking data, monitors each request to analyze against the criteria, and flags clients as bots. I would think you would want this engine to run against the web logs and not against live requests for performance reasons, but you could load test this. I would imagine the system would work like this (using your stackoverflow example): The engine reads a log entry of a web hit, then adds it to its database of webhits, aggregating that hit with all other hits by that unique user on that unique page, and record the timestamp, so that two timestamps get recorded, that of the first hit in the series, and that of the most recent, and the total hit count in the series is incremented. Then query that list by subtracting the time of the first hit from the time of the last for all series that have a hit count over your threshold. Unique users which fail the check are flagged. Then on the front-end you simply check all hits against that list of flagged users, and act accordingly. Granted, my algorithm is flawed as I just thought it up on the spot. If you google around, you will find that there is lots of free code in different languages that has this functionality. The trick is thinking up the right rules to flag bot behavior. << [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6979285/protecting-from-registration-bots https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6979285/protecting-from-...