Hello Giuseppe,
sorry for the late response. I’ve been travelling
with no access to my computer.
Huge thanks for disabling the filtering rule early.
All is working again.
Also big thanks to Timo and William – if this mistake
occurs again, I’ll change my user agent.
Everybody – thank you very much for your honest wish
for help.
Merci beacoup!
Martini
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
--
Giuseppe Lavagetto
Principal Site Reliability Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation