On Thu, 18 Apr 2002, Olivier M. wrote:

> what about patching fink to make it set the useragent on the fink and
> curl command line to something "classical" ? (Mozilla, IE, etc...).
> Would be a small thing, and would prevent further problems of his kind.

I don't like that idea. Automated scrapers/spiders using command-line
tools like Curl or Wget can be a real problem for web admins (who are
possibly facing bandwidth charges for this), and if they want to filter on
these tools to prevent malicious use I can't really fault them for that.

We can, on the other hand, better identify ourselves, by using the exact
same hack. I think that if the user agent field is altered, it should
noted that we're using Fink, OSX, and whatever command tool, and it ought
to have an email address or URL for admins to contact if they have any
concerns. So, for example:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; OSX Fink/0.9.11 using Wget/1.8.1, http://fink.sourceforge.net)

Or something along those lines. I don't like the idea of putting in that
silly "Mozilla 4.0 compatible" bit, but that seems pretty standard. We
could instead just go with

OSX Fink/0.9.11 using Wget/1.8.1, http://fink.sourceforge.net

But I'm worried that that might get filtered out too. *shrug*



--
Chris Devers                                [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Apache / mod_perl / http://homepage.mac.com/chdevers/resume/

"More war soon. You know how it is."    -- mnftiu.cc


_______________________________________________
Fink-devel mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel

Reply via email to