Testing 1,2,3...

If you're reading this, congratulations—you have successfully navigated the login page.

Like I said in the earlier post on this subject, I'm not wild about forcing people to log in to see this website, but I've got to find some way to curtail the scraperbots. They just keep coming, and the Cloudfare experiment wasn't mitigating bandwidth usage even though it appeared for a while like it might be. There was some positive effect with it in other ways, but there was also some negative and on balance it doesn't seem to be worth it. Most of what it was blocking were things I was already successfully blocking without it, the only real difference being I had a lot more data about the attempts.

So, now I'm trying this. I hope it isn't too much of a headache for users; it should only be a once-a-month thing for you all on each device you might use, just be sure to check the "keep me signed in for 30 days" box, or else you'll be prompted to log in every time on every page. That would be seriously annoying.

Of course, if my low-tech method of giving login creds doesn't fool the bots, this will be for naught and I'll end the experiment. We'll see how it goes.

UPDATE: Too many functionality problems with this, so I'm killing it already. The experiment lasted less than two hours. It was successful in blocking the bots; that worked perfectly, at least in the short term. But it also prevented RSS feed operations and link sharing to social media and various other positive elements. If I ever find a way around that, then maybe I'll try again.