It would be helpful to communicate something along the lines of "You're hitting our servers at an excessively high rate. Your IP has been blocked for x hours. Please take action to keep this from happening again."
You could also list possible benign causes (e.g. browser problems, naive crawling/scraping implementations).
This should reduce some confusion and save you some email.
1. Point on signal versus noise taken. A large part had to do with that I didn't have the time and skill to dive into problem more deeply (e.g. to get some sort of request trace from Chromium and file it as a bug). It was late, I should only post in the morning after sleeping on my posts.
2. Point on dev builds (and Chrome vs. Chromium) also taken. I realize it's one thing to use "trunk" on something that I use as a developer, where I engage with the software as a producer, and another to use it for software that I just want to work and not worry about it. I will switch my browsers to stable versions, since I'm a browser consumer, not developer.
3. Number of open tabs: During this incident, I had perhaps 40 to 50 tabs open, with around 10 to 15 hacker news pages.
4. Requests on restart were not the problem - I connected the browser to a dead proxy before restarting, and then went through the tabs stopping each one manually. Only after that did I reactivate my connection. My annoyance came from the fact that Chromium just started hammering away at pages "behind my back" so to speak, after I had manually told it to stop trying to connect.
5. Thanks for your recommendations on bookmarking alternatives.
6. I posted this here because hacker news was the only site that issued me a fairly explicit ban, and I wanted to help others with the same problem out. A few people responded that they've had the same/similar problems, so it wasn't a total waste.
You could also list possible benign causes (e.g. browser problems, naive crawling/scraping implementations).
This should reduce some confusion and save you some email.