Hi all, When I wrote the new API client library standard, one of the intended effects was that libraries would make it easy for bot-runners to comply with the user-agent policy found at https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-agent_policy . However, different people understand the policy to mean different things. As I read it, the relevant parts of the policy are: "If you run a bot, please send a User-Agent header identifying the bot and supplying some way of contacting you, e.g.: `User-Agent: MyCoolTool/1.1 (http://example.com/MyCoolTool/; MyCoolTool(a)example.com) BasedOnSuperLib/1.4`" There's been some discussion in the context of my client library evaluation project here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/API_talk:Client_code/Evaluations/Java_Wiki_B… and here: https://github.com/jpatokal/mediawiki-gateway/issues/65 . As I understood it, the example provided demonstrated the requirements, but it's now clear to me that there's room for ambiguity in the interpretation of the user-agent policy. My question is: what information is essential to "identify" a bot? The example given appears to contain the bot name and version, a link to a page with more information and/or the repository for the bot's code, and the framework that was used to write the bot (SuperLib/1.4, I assume). Does WMF operations want all of these components? What is the minimum necessary to comply with the policy, and what is bonus information? -Frances _______________________________________________ Mediawiki-api mailing list Mediawiki-api(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api

I have. What I took from that thread was "the more information you provide, the more likely it is that ops will be able to contact you if your bot is causing problems" and "there should definitely be some way to contact the person running the bot, whether via talk page for a logged-in bot or via email or similar." Is that accurate?

If so, there's still ambiguity in the "more information is probably better" and it would still be useful to know how much is enough.

Just notifying you that we are working on customized user-agent: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Pywikibot/User-agent Is it good? specially the default

User agents that send a User-Agent header that is blacklisted (for

Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is

Thanks, Brad. That is helpful. -Frances On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 7:45 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: frances.hocutt(a)gmail.com> opaque other reference _______________________________________________ Mediawiki-api mailing list Mediawiki-api(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-api