Starting today, users of the London Stage Database might notice that downloading your search results requires you to first click a button that says “I’m human.”
We’re using Google’s Recapcha service to implement this feature, which is necessary to protect the website infrastructure from the bot attacks that have overloading our server and taking the site down several times a day. Also known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, these bot swarms are the cause of the frequent outages you might have noticed if you’ve tried to use our site over the past couple of weeks. HUGE thanks to Analyst Programmer John Zhao, Research Data Management Librarian Erin Winter, and Special Projects Librarian Franny Gaede for an amazing all-hands response this week once we realized what was happening.
Hopefully, with this fix in place, you can wrap up your summer research using LSDB without any further interruptions!