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I was wondering if you can prevent this by looking at the "Accept" header in the request but it seems accept is "/" for scripts. I'd expect the browsers rather to send "application/javascript".

Then the answer from my server will be 400 because I don't have a javascript representation of this url.

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Well, you're still spammed with requests.

Yes, but it is not the same if I can reply with 400 directly without further inspection.

I imagine github can do this at the reverse proxy level, instead of doing 20 queries to mysql and overload the ruby application.

Well, GitHub is already returning a special response for those URLs.

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