Thanks for your reply. I'm not entirely sure how caching works though. Are you describing a situation in which one requests exactly the same data (which would be pointless), or one in which one accesses different data from the same parameters (like stepping through articles in a category)? Every login and edit request is a POST. The logout routine can use GET but will not be repetitious. Download routines can use GET. I'm a bit dubious about whether that's a good enough reason for me to dump additional code and a command line option into my bot, though. Richard -----Original Message----- From: Roan Kattouw <roan.kattouw(a)gmail.com> To: MediaWiki API announcements & discussion <mediawiki-api(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: richardcavell(a)mail.com Sent: Sun, Mar 27, 2011 2:22 am Subject: Re: [Mediawiki-api] Is there an advantage to putting parameters in the URL? 2011/3/26 <richardcavell(a)mail.com>om>: The only advantage I can think of is caching. If you're repeating the same request a number of times and want any caching proxies between you and the server (e.g. Wikimedia's Squid servers) to cache the result for you, you can put &smaxage=3600 (or any number of seconds) in the URL. This only works for GET requests and only when the URLs are exactly the same both times. Roan Kattouw (Catrope)