On Sat, Jun 28, 2025 at 1:49 AM Bryan Davis bd808@wikimedia.org wrote:
Your User-Agent is old. A lot of the misbehaving web crawlers we are seeing these days spoof very old Firefox and Chrome User-Agents. I am 99.9% certain that your traffic is ending up in a low rate limit bucket tracked at our CDN edge because of the relative age of your web browser.
Hi,
yes, specifically, his browser is old and the connection is most likely coming from the same ISPs we've seen disruptive crawling, that caused some local unavailability of our media files. So what Bryan said is correct - you were most likely caught in one of the filtering rules we've created to respond to that attack.
I am sorry you got caught up in that traffic, but at the time that was the only option we had to keep serving images to a good portion of asia and the americas.
We usually keep rules live for 30 days, as policy, after an attack. Given the crawler seems to have stopped (that's not a given, a lot of crawlers keep flooding us with requests for months after being blocked...) I will disable the filter early.
That will unblock you for now, but please be aware that if you use such an old browser you're prone to have your traffic confused with abusers and thus blocked, especially on upload.wikimedia.org where we have less signals to tell apart a very old but real browser and a crawler pretending to be one.
I would follow the suggestions you received: ideally, use a OS/browser that don't have dozens of unpatched vulnerabilities when browsing the internet; if you don't want to do that, at least change your UA if you get blocked again.
Cheers,
Giuseppe