https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=28884

--- Comment #6 from Krinkle <[email protected]> 2011-05-08 20:58:18 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> (In reply to comment #1)
> > Web developers making Ajax requests (XHttpRequest) can't and don't have to
> > touch the User-Agent. The browser environment in which you are in already 
> > has
> > this set. If this is not the case, I'd say contact your browser vendor, not 
> > a
> > bug.
> 
> From the User-Agent policy [1]: "Do not copy a browser's user agent for your
> bot, as bot-like behavior with a browser's user agent will be assumed
> malicious."
> 
> The browser environment is UIWebView [6], which has Safari's default user 
> agent
> string -- it doesn't contain the required contact information, and it can't be
> modified using UIWebView's public API.
> 

That quote from the policy means that, say, you're creating a PHP application
that is going to massively interact with something on Wikimedia (say an
automated vandalism revert bot for en.wikipedia.org that extracts a lot of
information and submits edits through the API). That you should not copy the
user-agent of a browser and do something like this:

<?php
ini_set( "user_agent", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6; nl-nl)
AppleWebKit/533 Version/5.0.4 Safari/533");


.. just to get around the user-agent requirement, doing the above is malicious,
since you're not really a Safari browser, but a PHP application.

However if you're executing your JavaScript widget in Safari or in an
application that in turn executes it's stuff via the Safari/WebKit framework
from Apple's operating system API or something like that, I don't think it's a
problem if those requests came into Wikimedia's servers with Safari default
user agent.

Granted, it would be nice if you could identify yourself somehow, but I'm not
sure it's that big a deal.

Most if not all requests from JavaScript gadgets on Wikimedia are sent with the
user-agent of the browser of the Wikimedian who uses the gadget.

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