Comment by rented_mule

Late one evening, about 15 years ago, we were wondering why we were seeing several hits per second from a single IP address on our company's search page. It didn't follow any of the patterns of the (admittedly simple) bot detection we had in place. It wasn't bad enough to be a problem, but we were trying to watch some real-time metrics and it was a distraction.

We had a monitor on the wall showing the most popular search terms over the past hour. A few minutes into the event, we saw a search term steadily move to the top of the list. It was something like `'[]`. After thinking about it for a few minutes, we concluded a user left their browser on our search page, a cat stepped on their keyboard in just the right pattern, and then sat down on the F5-key (i.e., refresh key).

No way to know if we got it right, but it was the best we came up with in the 20-ish minutes before it stopped. Oh the things you'll diagnose...