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@chris

I hate bots

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I'm fighting against bots/scrapers hammering a public search endpoint running super intensive spam(ish) search queries. Think `LIKE` statements across multiple columns on a 180,000-row table. Classic WordPress core search.

Look at that drop off after disabling the endpoint, and killing it early. 

Although we're working on moving off of WordPress soon, I still need to fix this for now.

Next steps:
  • Disable core `?s=` queries, and move search to `/search/keyword`
  • This will let me lock it down further at the WAF layer
  • Re-evaluate how we handle search under the hood (hint: core search won’t cut it)