I also love basic auth, and built in an option for it into my blog/publishing engine. It's supported by pretty much every browser and client, going back to cla

I also love basic auth, and built in an option for it into my blog/publishing engine. It's supported by pretty much every browser and client, going back to classics like Mosaic and Netscape. I can also use it flexibly combined with cookies, since the initial request already contains cookies, and I can skip auth for those who already have them. The biggest advantage of using HTTP auth for my site I've found is that it's cut my bot traffic to nearly zero. I'm now sure that most traffic is, if not 100% human, at least has a human element. I set the credentials to admin:admin and AzureDiamond:hunter2 by default. To be fair, I run a service for hackers and don't care about being found in search engines, like, at all.