I built the Gitea API Protector in response to a request for help that maintainers of codeberg.org put out on the fediverse in january of 2020. Codeberg was (and probably still is) one of the largest public gitea instances and as such was having trouble with spam bots that would create spam issues on repositories using the API. My solution was to lock new users out of API access and have them apply for it through a pull request they could create using the gitea web UI. The people from codeberg were interested, but in the end they didn't end up going with my solution. Nevertheless the software is fully functional and the codebase is small enough for people to change it for their own use cases if they so desired.

A more elaborate explanation of the technical details an setup instructions can be found in the README of the repository on codeberg.org.