I think the semantics of 999 is "bugger off, you are not supposed to be here. I will not grace you with a proper status code". Because sending a status code, ev

I think the semantics of 999 is "bugger off, you are not supposed to be here. I will not grace you with a proper status code". Because sending a status code, even a 4xx or a 5xx, acknowledges the request and plays along by giving a well-formed answer. If you want to respond impolitely, you could just terminate the connection, or send plaintext "Don't scrape me, we are watching you" instead of a HTTP response, but I can imagine that doesn't work properly with proxies and middleware. The conventional nonsense response "418 I am a teapot" has been standardized unfortunately. But `return Response("Request Denied", status=999)` is easy to write and does the job.