First of all, thank you all for being so supportive of my attempts to thwart the bots. This current method of directing to old chapter links in the current post seems to be working well so far, but quite a few readers have asked for me to implement some sort of captcha instead.
So here’s how I feel about it:
With having the actual links on a different post, avid readers can just refresh that page once they get a notification that new chapters have been posted. Readers that like to stockpile chapters can just go to the chapter they left off on from the table of contents.
My apprehensions with the captchas is:
1) I don’t know how often it’ll pop up, so it might become annoying if you have to wait even longer before accessing each chapter. Also, it requires javascript, so readers that don’t have javascript enabled won’t be able to get past the captcha.
2) I don’t know if it’ll keep out the bots.
3) As far as I know, recaptchas can only be applied to forms, so I’ll probably have to place the links to the chapter (or the chapter?) inside a form somehow.
However, since I’m also getting pretty curious about how recaptchas work and if they’ll keep out the bots, I’ll be testing it out, probably Tues or Weds. So while this investigation on the bots is ongoing, please continue giving me feedback~
But for now, keep an eye on the latest release post.