As I continue to make further tweaks to the server, a couple of major tweaks have been added.

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The site will now watch who's refreshing pages. If you load more than 50 pages over the course of 2 minutes, it'll block you for a little while.
At first, I was worried that that might be too few page refreshes over a couple of minutes, but it feels like a nice even number, and it also ignores certain parameters, like if you refresh the scoreboard pages, or post a comment, or click the likes.

If it turns out to be problematic, I can easily bump that number up a little, but for now it doesn't appear to be an issue.

For now, though, it's reduced the number of evil spikes that have been showing up in the stats lately. Now the spikes have all been flattened, and whatever bots are doing these things, have had to pace themselves in order to access all the data that they're obviously mining from the site.

All is golden.
.. Until the next unforeseeable complication!!