As many of you know, one of the attractions of Betfair has been the lack of transaction charges. For traders this has meant that you could zip in and out of the market with little risk and cost. While this has been great it has also encouraged a lot of abuse of Betfair's system. You could have probably predicted this as Betfair suffers from the 'M25 syndrome'. It's busy so you add more capacity, which only ends up making it even busier, so you add more capacity; repeat ad infinitum.....
As Betfair's business matured it was likely that there would be pressure to address the amount of 'wasted' calls that were hitting their servers. By wasted calls I mean people calling their servers without placing a bet or without really generating any clear revenue. Some time ago Betfair introduced an upper transaction limit where you would be charged if you exceed 1000 bet placements and modifications an hour. About this time last year Betfair introduced changes to the website that made screen scraping applications less effective and now they are really lowering the bar by introducing a limit on calls to Betfair per second. It is likely you will receive an email in the near future if you are likely to be affected.
You can read more about this change here, in section four: -
http://content.betfair.com/aboutus/?product=exchange&sWhichKey=Betfair%20Charges
http://site.forum.betfair.com/jive3/...ssageCount=113
