What happens if you use the proper rate limiting status of 429? It includes a next retry time [1]. I'm curious what (probably small) fraction would respect it.
I use IP addy. Users behind cgnat are already used to getting captcha the first time around
There’s some stuff you can do, like creating risk scores (if a user changes ip and uses the same captcha token, increase score). Many vendors do that, as does my captcha provider.
It really sucks that this is the way things are, but what I did was
10 requests for pages in a minute, you get captchad (with a little apology and the option to bypass it by logging in). asset loads don’t count
After a captcha pass, 100 requests in an hour gets you auth walled
It’s really shitty but my industry is used to content scraping.
This allows legit users to get what they need. Although my users maybe don’t need prolonged access ahem.