d) Last I checked, both QIC and IC ship by default with configurations to use our CDN to serve thumbnails; given the progressive increase in bandwidth requirements, and the constant saturation of our internet links, we encourage people to host their own thumbnails if possible; especially if your site is very popular.
This is a change in policy that has not been previously announced, is not documented on https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:$wgUseInstantCommons, and does not match the default behavior of $wgUseInstantCommons. If WMF wants people to do something, they have to actually communicate it.
AntiCompositeNumber (they/them)
On Thu, Mar 5, 2026, at 01:30, Giuseppe Lavagetto via Wikitech-l wrote:
On Wed, Mar 4, 2026 at 5:00 PM Brian Wolff via Wikitech-l wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Its probably not this rate limit change (i assume its the media limit change), but many people have reported this with (quick) instant commons. I am aware of at least one site who was able to negotiate an exception to the limit.
QuickInstantCommons supports configuring the max cache time, as a first step try increasing that significantly.
To clarify this point a bit, given I see a lot of guesswork in this thread:
a) In the last year, we progressively started enforcing our user-agent policy, given that both QIC and IC allow you to set your own user-agent; if people modify their user-agent to include contact information, the limit is much higher than if they don't. In fact, not modifying the User-Agent is in violation of our user-agent policy. b) Both IC and QIC have the not-so-nice property of being O(N) in the number of API calls made, with N being the number of images imported; as Brian said, increasing the caching max time is an inevitable requirement if you are importing a lot of images c) It is still possible to get your bot identified; the blocking message includes an email address to contact to discuss exceptions d) Last I checked, both QIC and IC ship by default with configurations to use our CDN to serve thumbnails; given the progressive increase in bandwidth requirements, and the constant saturation of our internet links, we encourage people to host their own thumbnails if possible; especially if your site is very popular.
None of the above has anything to do with the announcement in this thread, but rather with the progressive enforcement of our robot policy over the last year.
Cheers,
Giuseppe
Giuseppe Lavagetto Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/