Josh Zhang, a staff site reliability engineer at Stack Overflow, tells Ryan and Eira how the Stack Exchange network defends against scraping bots. They also cover the emergence of human botnets, why DDoS attacks have spiked in the last couple of years, and the constant balancing act of protecting sites from attack without inhibiting legitimate users.

Eira May

Unfriendly comments are an issue in our system because of the effect that their tone has on their recipient’s and future readers’ willingness to contribute to Stack Overflow. The solution to these issues isn’t to argue about circumstance or intent. The only remaining option is to work on the comments themselves.

Jason Punyon, Kevin Montrose