2 chapters across the catalog
The group discusses "tar pitting"—slowing down requests to human scale—as an alternative to outright blocking. Spurlock advocates for open access to media without discrimination, suggesting that hosting companies should innovate in how they serve media rather than restricting access.
Dave Jones describes his daily battle with bot traffic on the Podcast Index, often resulting in manual rate limiting and the use of 429 "Too Many Requests" error codes. He notes that most abusive traffic disappears once it is blocked, though some legitimate developers reach out to fix their code.
