Marciej mentioned the following when I noticed myself and asked what the cause was:
> Unfortunately you've run into a necessary anti-crawling measure that keeps the site from getting overwhelmed. About four months ago I started getting hammered by distributed crawlers from Chinese IPs, with no real way to block them short of blocking the entire IP range. Putting things behind a login is a stopgap while I try to figure out a more durable and friendly solution that makes it possible to have public-facing pages again.