I met a guy at a party who started a news outfit[1] trying to simplify FOIA. He had stories like this galore- such as meeting gov't employees in person at conferences, saying his name, and seeing their eyes grow big. Apparently frequent requesters become notorious.
Yes, MuckRock is a great service, not least of which for the window it provides all non-customers into how our government FOIA works. By default, if you file a request, that request -- including all of its updates and resulting response -- is publicly viewable:
Before FOIAing an agency, I'll sometimes check MuckRock to get a better understanding of what to expect, including who to direct my letter to and an estimate of how long I might wait...or best of all, examples of precedent to use to bolster my legal standing ("On June 3, 2014, you fulfilled a similar request for James Smith via Muckrock").
Hell, you don't even have to be in the FOIA-writing mindset...just reading that list will give you a veritable shitton of ideas of the kinds of things about government that has piqued the interest of other reporters, private investigators, politicians, and hedge fund analysts. Analyzing the metadata alone would make for a very useful service.
Huge shoutout for Muckrock. I use them extensively, and have worked with Michael (the founder) a bit. Can't say enough nice things.
Please please please check out their site if you're doing FOIAs. There is a cost, but its minimal, and worth it. They'll help you manage the FOIA process, and whatever records are returned become public on Muckrock's site.
Indeed, some state FOIA laws even have provisions for dealing with "frequent requestors." (And to be fair, not all frequent requestors are acting in good faith. There was a push recently to bury the NSA in FOIA requests as a protest against surveillance. Not a great idea.)
That is solved by a weighted queue based on an individual and rate limiting based on budget.
E.g. The Pentagon will answer 100,000 requests per month, each individual will have a spot in the queue, when a request is received the next request from that individual is at (N requests * -1) in weight.
So:
X, Request 1, 0
N, Request 2, 0
Z, Request 3, 0
A, Request 5, 0
Q, Request 7, 0
X, Request 4, -1 [will be weighted 0 for next month]
X, Request 6, -2 [will be weighted -1 for next month]
[1] https://www.muckrock.com