On Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Jamie Morken jmorken@shaw.ca wrote:
Don't forget some normal traffic was blocked from this unannounced change, ie. Google's translate service? How much of the traffic reduction was from services like this? Some of the cited reduced traffic proving the strategies success is coming from valid services. Be careful or soon you will be saying: "you are either with wikimedia or with the terrorists"? :)
With this solution, it is now possible to determine how much of the traffic was from valid services. i.e. google translate and other useful services will identify themselves, and the traffic graph will rise accordingly.
Note that I am not in favour of the solution, as it breaks backwards compatibility with tools. Unannounced breakages are especially nasty. e.g. it could have been quite easy to shoot an email to Google asking that they add a user-agent for the unidentified traffic.
I am even less in favour of Domas retiring to an armchair, and think that anyone suggesting that is deluding themselves about Wikimedia's need of Domas, and Domas' reason for volunteering.
-- John Vandenberg