On Sep 14, 2010, at 12:20 PM, Richard Weait wrote: > On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 3:07 PM, Michal Migurski <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> It'd be interesting if the limit was in some way discoverable. I understand >> that it's not a game, but it would be immensely helpful if the back-off >> message was advisory rather than punitive. I can imagine this being >> expressed as HTTP headers that let you know how long to wait until your next >> request, or how close a client is to being blocked. I can adapt to whatever >> the current limitations are, but only if they're communicated in a >> machine-parseable way. > > The risk with setting quantified guidelines is that somebody will > interpret that limit as either a promise of performance or a maximum > acceptable use of resources. Then a few hundred more iWhatever > applications will make the same "reasonable" demands on OSM resources > and be upset that we're hurting their business model when we move the > guidelines down, or cut them off without notice.
I definitely agree with this, which is why I think it'd be good for it to be a mutating, advisory limit based on circumstances. I'm not sure what precedents exist for this, but if the API responded with headers that informed the client of time-until-cutoff, then it would be possible to dynamically rate-limit in favor of mappers and editors. > Yes, providing tiles for the curious newcomer, casual > user, and busy entrepreneur is useful promotion of OSM. But it can > not be at the expense of mappers. Blocks, to date, have only been > applied to users who lie vastly outside of the average user. The very > smallest fraction of one percent of all users, consuming an enormous > relative percentage of the resources. Fully agreed as well. It'd just be nice if the limitation weren't expressed as a hard "fuck off" but a soft "slow down". -mike. ---------------------------------------------------------------- michal migurski- [email protected] 415.558.1610 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
