Hello everyone,
I was wondering if there currently is something like a "tile usage
policy". I.e. a policy about who can use tiles served from the
toolserver and how many tiles they are allowed to request?
Other tileservers like the one at
osm.org, have had problems with "tile
scrapers", usually smart phone applications that download large areas of
tiles systematically for later offline use. They have had to enforce
their policy either by throttling or outright banning applications and
users, as a few tile scrapers can quickly overwhelm the resources of a
tileserver.
So far I don't think this has been much of an issue on the toolserver
tileserver and there hasn't really been a need to enforce or limit
access yet. I did see some behaviour that looked suspiciously like large
scale tile scraping today though (systematic rendering of large number
of empty hikebike tiles at Z14) and so it might be good to have a policy
in place before it becomes an issue in the future.
OpenStreetMap's tile usage policy can be found at
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy for reference.
Kai