I understand that ChipGuide needs to be protected from an attack. Seventy-eight thousand requests for one page in a day is obviously not normal traffic.

I also understand that the administrator can likely see whether those requests are coming from one IP address, a crawler, a scraper, or something more deliberate. I am not trying to start anything. I am simply trying to understand why restricting public access is the response.

When a nonmember tries to view one of the protected pages, they do not get an explanation or a way to access the information. They receive an HTTP 401 error that simply says the page is not working.

That is a problem for a public reference guide. A new collector, researcher, or someone who finds a chip or something related to that casino will assume ChipGuide is broken and move on.

ChipGuide is valuable because it is a free source of information for everyone: CCA members, nonmembers, new collectors, researchers, and people around the world who are trying to identify a chip or collectible.

I hope this is only a temporary emergency measure, and that a long-term solution can block or rate-limit abusive traffic while keeping the guide accessible to the public.