On Tue, Sep 9, 2014 at 5:57 PM, Mark Holmquist <mtraceur@member.fsf.org> wrote:

On Tue, Sep 09, 2014 at 11:53:10AM -0400, Oliver Keyes wrote:
> URL runs "
> http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Image:Grandville_torrent.jpg&action=render&uselang=en",
> user_agent is "MediaWiki/1.24wmf19". Is this you guys?

It might be CommonsMetadata asking for the DOM so it can find description,
authour, etc.

tgr, maybe we could futz with the user agent for those requests?

This is probably File::getDescriptionText fetching the description page from a remote file repository. CommonsMetadata uses this; so does vanilla MediaWiki to display the local file page for a non-local file, both for WMF sites and third-party sites with InstantCommons.

We could change the user agent for file page fetches but not specifically for CMD vs. local file page view (not easily anway). Then again, as far as user agents go it is fairly accurate. Information about the purpose or source of the request is usually sent as an extra query parameter or extra header, not as part of the user agent.