alt Hacker News> moved to iocaine which is slightly different in what it does, and that was fine until so many scrapers hit my site that it saturated my upload with generated content feeding the them
You're feeding bots poison without rate limiting them all to some small fraction of your pipe?
iocaine has shipped firewall support to temporarily drop traffic from IPs after you've fed them an appropriate amount poison. More people should enable it.
You should not traffic shape the egress lest you run out of workers handling legitimate traffic. You should also make sure connections are appropriately terminated on your side for the same reason.