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@rhowe
I don't run the petitions site, so I can't really say whether it's had much bot activity or not but those who do seem relatively confident in their anti-bot measures.
I was keeping half an eye on the scramble to make it scale with the load it was being put under though - quite an effort by the team responsible. The stats were the bit that they sacrificed first - calculating the rate of signatures and even the sum total were putting quite a load on the backend I think, so they took them down for a bit to allow the site to continue to function. They reappeared later once some optimisations had been made (again, I don't know the details).
Best guess would be that they scaled their database server up massively and optimised some queries or some other code somewhere, maybe making it more asynchronous or cached at the same time.