>I'm very strongly against the suggestion of blocking anyone's access
>to api.php or the wikis in general over not having "bot" in the
>user-agent string however. Getting cleaner analytics is a nice goal
>but the point of the projects is to collect and disseminate
>information.
Much agreed.





On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 1:29 PM, Bryan Davis <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 2, 2016 at 12:40 PM, Marcel Ruiz Forns <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > It seems comments are decreasing at this point. I'd like to slowly drive
> > this thread to a conclusion.
> >
> >
> >> 3. Create a plan to block clients that dont implement the (amended)
> >> User-Agent policy.
> >
> >
> > I think we can decide on this later. Steps 1) and 2) can be done first -
> > they should be done anyway before 3) - and then we can see how much
> benefit
> > we raise from them. If we don't get a satisfactory reaction from
> > bot/framework maintainers, we then can go for 3). John, would you be OK
> with
> > that?
> >
> >
> > If no-one else raises concerns about this, the Analytics team will:
> >
> > Add a mention to https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User-Agent_policy, to
> > encourage including the word "bot" (case-insensitive) in the User-Agent
> > string, so that bots can be easily identified.
> >
> > Advertise the convention and reach out to bot/framework maintainers to
> > increase the share of bots that implement the User-Agent policy.
>
> The proposed plan sounds good to me.
>
> I'm very strongly against the suggestion of blocking anyone's access
> to api.php or the wikis in general over not having "bot" in the
> user-agent string however. Getting cleaner analytics is a nice goal
> but the point of the projects is to collect and disseminate
> information. You might get blocked for doing something deliberately
> harmful to the services or the community, but getting blocked for not
> following an arbitrary convention that causes no real harm is extreme.
> You will quickly find yourself in a strange conundrum as well. To
> block you will need to establish intent of the User Agent and if you
> can do that then you probably don't need the "bot" tagging convention
> in the first place.
>
> Bryan
> --
> Bryan Davis              Wikimedia Foundation    <[email protected]>
> [[m:User:BDavis_(WMF)]]  Sr Software Engineer            Boise, ID USA
> irc: bd808                                        v:415.839.6885 x6855
>
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