>I'm very strongly against the suggestion of blocking anyone's access
>to api.php or the wikis in general over not having "bot" in the
>user-agent string however. Getting cleaner analytics is a nice goal
>but the point of the projects is to collect and disseminate
>information.
Much agreed. 





On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Bryan Davis <bd808@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Marcel Ruiz Forns <mforns@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> It seems comments are decreasing at this point. I'd like to slowly drive
> this thread to a conclusion.
>
>
>> 3. Create a plan to block clients that dont implement the (amended)
>> User-Agent policy.
>
>
> I think we can decide on this later. Steps 1) and 2) can be done first -
> they should be done anyway before 3) - and then we can see how much benefit
> we raise from them. If we don't get a satisfactory reaction from
> bot/framework maintainers, we then can go for 3). John, would you be OK with
> that?
>
>
> If no-one else raises concerns about this, the Analytics team will:
>
> Add a mention to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_policy, to
> encourage including the word "bot" (case-insensitive) in the User-Agent
> string, so that bots can be easily identified.
>
> Advertise the convention and reach out to bot/framework maintainers to
> increase the share of bots that implement the User-Agent policy.

The proposed plan sounds good to me.

I'm very strongly against the suggestion of blocking anyone's access
to api.php or the wikis in general over not having "bot" in the
user-agent string however. Getting cleaner analytics is a nice goal
but the point of the projects is to collect and disseminate
information. You might get blocked for doing something deliberately
harmful to the services or the community, but getting blocked for not
following an arbitrary convention that causes no real harm is extreme.
You will quickly find yourself in a strange conundrum as well. To
block you will need to establish intent of the User Agent and if you
can do that then you probably don't need the "bot" tagging convention
in the first place.

Bryan
--
Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <bd808@wikimedia.org>
[[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855

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