FreshBSD uses Vinyl Cache for Anti-Scraper Defence

2026-11-12

Thomas Hurst, who runs the FreshBSD commit log search engine, reported great success with a simple Anti-Scraper Defence using the good old cookie monster idea, but requiring a POST request. He also wrote about it on Mastodon.

His VCL simply sets a cookie with a fixed name, which makes for a nice, clean implementation. One possible improvement in the same direction was to cryptographically sign the cookie, as shown in our Signing Cookies with Vinyl Cache Tips & Tricks article.