It does seem the more rational response would be to rate-limit him (and by him I mean everyone) down to once every 30 seconds or so rather than panic and ban hi

It does seem the more rational response would be to rate-limit him (and by him I mean everyone) down to once every 30 seconds or so rather than panic and ban him forever. I once wrote a script to analyze queries of one of the major search engines. As long as I only sent a request every 2 seconds, it was not a problem. Once I crossed that threshold, within a minute, kaboom. By the time I did that I had more than enough data for my nefarious (actually mostly innocuous) purposes at the time and just wanted to see when I'd get crushed.