On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 11:32 AM, Ariel T. Glenn ariel@wikimedia.orgwrote:
In fact some WMF paid employees (including me) were in the channel at that time and agreed with the decision. It seemed then and still seems to me a reasonable course of action given the circumstances. I understand it's aggravating to people who didn't get notice; let's look forward. PLease just add the UA header and your tools / bots/ etc. will be back to working. Thanks.
It's not a big deal for anyone aware of the problem. Adding "User-Agent: Janna" to my scripts is no big deal, nor is adding a randomized UA from a list of common UAs in privoxy (I'm pretty sure there's a plugin for that).
I do wonder how many people are going to wind up getting strange errors that they don't know how to fix due to this, though. Is it at all feasible to throttle such traffic rather than blocking it completely?