Searching too fast

Maybe my connections is just glitching because I couldn't get to the talk page through the help window - but I am adding books to my library and have encountered an error I have never seen before. It tells me no results found (for a very common book) but also says I am searching too fast and need to wait a few minutes. Is this a new thing? I always batch add my books every few months, so I am adding 100+ at a time.

When you say adding books, are you adding from the Add Books page or from the searching Librarything and clicking the Gree Add + button?

Yes. We have had to add rate-limiting to our Add Books section. This is to deal with an increase in tens of thousands of requests from automated bots trying to use us to farm book data from our Add Books sources.

Hopefully this is temporary. At worst it will be permanent but we will devise ways to make it better for real users. But we are currently in unexplored territory right now with the number of bots and "bad actors" that are sucking our resources constantly.

This is an emergency measure enacted earlier today, so you just happened to time it perfectly.

Can you give me some info though? Are you adding via the web interface or the app? If via the app are you using the barcode scanning?
I'm trying to get a sense of speed to set the rate-limits ot something reasonable for normal users (but still stop bad actors from using us to harvest data from libraries all over the world).

I hope this isn't applied to the "add manually" page. I can't imagine a worse reward for manually entering book details than a message that says, "sorry, you've added too many books today!"

>4 patch5:

My understanding from >3 conceptDawg: is that the limit is on how fast you can add books, not on how many you add. I can't imagine that someone could add books quickly enough manually to trigger this.

Besides, it limits how fast you can search, and you don't search when adding manually.

Correct, it only limits searches on add books sources. But, if you can add manually fast enough, in theory, to trip the rate-limiter then you are a much, much faster user of the computer than I am. :)

>7 conceptDawg: Will that apply to scanning ISBNs with the app as well? Sometimes I will line up all the books i want to add, scan them quickly and then switch to a bigger screen to edit and fix.

If it needs to be restricted, that's fine. Just wondering if I need to change my workflow a bit while the restriction is in place :)

>3 conceptDawg: I am using the website, from the Add Books tab, and typing, searching, selecting, repeat for what should be about 400 books today, but I have bumped into the message about four times so far.
That makes sense, those darn bots.

>8 AnnieMod: Yes it will. But again, they are very generous limits. If you can hit the new limits, I'd be surprised. (pleasantly surprised, but surprised nonetheless)

There is a lower limit for typed searches vs. scanned searches (obviously)

Hi, I'm new to LT. I'm searching for my books on the Add books page, and after I hit search it thinks for a little while and then the page just sort of blinks and then stays the same. The "0 results" message never comes up. I've tried typing keywords, scanning ISBN codes, type ISBN codes, it makes no difference.

It was working maybe half an hour ago, but now it's stuck like this. I'm definitely not doing things very fast. Any clues?

>12 RPHRadiologyLibrary:

Yeah. Fix coming soon. A bug introduced by me, trying to get a better handle on the issue above.

>13 timspalding:

I think it's working now :) Thanks!

Yes, apologies for the errors.