Skip to main content

The "Quick check" page

Some pages are expensive to build: a commit's diff, a page of history, a merge request's changes, and search all read git objects live on every request. To keep crawlers and bots from burning the instance's capacity, git-shark gives every visitor a budget of those pages per minute. Go over it and you land on a Quick check page (or, if your instance has no bot check configured, you get a plain Too many requests response and can simply retry a moment later).

What counts against the budget​

Only these pages, and only when you open them:

  • a commit's detail page (…/commit/<id>)
  • a page of the Commits list (…/commits/<branch>)
  • a merge request's page, which renders its diff
  • the search results page

Everything else — repository overviews, branch and tag lists, issues, profiles, your settings — is not metered. Neither is git clone, git fetch or git push: git traffic and the REST API are not affected at all, so your tooling never sees a check.

Solving the check​

The check is a Cloudflare Turnstile or hCaptcha widget, depending on what the instance's admin configured. Most of the time it solves itself and you are sent straight back to the page you wanted. Once solved, the confirmation lasts for a while (15 minutes by default), so you are not asked again on every page. It moves you onto the same, much larger budget signed-in users get — it is not an unlimited pass, but normal browsing never comes close to the ceiling.

The check needs JavaScript. If you have it turned off, log in instead.

Logging in gives you a much bigger budget​

Anonymous visitors share one budget per IP address; signed-in users are metered per account with a far higher allowance (by default 120 pages per minute instead of 30). If you keep hitting the check while browsing normally, log in — that is the intended fix, not a workaround.

If you keep seeing it​

  • Behind a shared or corporate IP address, other people's browsing counts against the same anonymous budget. Logging in gives you your own.
  • If the check itself fails to load or keeps rejecting you, tell your instance admin: the widget keys may be misconfigured, or the provider unreachable from the server.