> I’ve disabled new page generation for now because someone ran a script overnight to endlessly click links and cost me $70. I don’t really understand why anybody would do that. Guess it wasn't so endless after all. Author is assuming malice, but honestly bots clicking links is just what happens to every public site on the internet. Not to mention going down the link clicking rabbit hole is common among wikipedia rea…
As a CS student ~20 years ago I wrote a small website to manage my todo list and hosted it on my desktop in the department. One day I found my items disappearing before my eyes. At first I assumed someone was intentionally messing with my app but logs indicated it was just a scraping bot someone was running.
It was a low stakes lesson on why GET should not mutate meaningful state. I knew when I built it anyone could click the links and I wasn’t bothered with auth since it was one accessible from within the department network. But I didn’t plan for the bots.