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