On Tue, Nov 25, 2025 at 11:55:13AM -0000, Stuart Henderson wrote: > On 2025-11-25, Crystal Kolipe <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Nov 25, 2025 at 06:17:59AM +0700, [email protected] wrote: > >> I sent the link of revision 1.4 of ed.c to someone else > >> and they confirmed they are redirected. > >> (others files and revisions of ed.c don't redirect me) > > > > The redirect usually happens when your browser doesn't supply a referer http > > header. > > > > It's an anti-scraping mechanism because automated bots were creating a heavy > > load on the server, (which runs a perl script to create each custom diff). > > the redirect to theannoyingsite wasn't a great joke in the first place > though and it would be better redirecting to something giving the poor > user some idea about what's going on.
I think the expectation was that very few people would hit it, because just browsing the cvsweb interactively with a typical web browser you're usually providing the expected header for the diff script. But in practice people do things like bookmark a particular revision of a file for later review, or manually pass a link to a generated diff to another machine to download with the ftp client, etc, etc, and that breaks the expectation.
