launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Graham Binns <graham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 2009/9/20 Max Bowsher <maxb@xxxxxxx>:
>> The obvious followup question, then, is: Why is this treated any
>> differently to someone abusively screenscraping information from
>> Launchpad webpages?
>
> The only way it's treated any differently is that we can cut a
> particular user off if they're abusing the API, whereas we have to
> block at the IP level for screen-scrapers, which is a bit of a blunter
> tool.

...IOW, if we *had* a way to fine-grainedly filter screenscrapers, we'd
do that too :-).  We can't -- but that's no reason to settle for less
where we can do better.

I hasten to add that "abusing" is not a term of intent.  The person
might not realize that their use causes a problem, and the problem could
be due to a bug in Launchpad rather than anything inherently high-load
about the use.  Nevertheless, being able to stop the problem surgically
while we fix it is still handy.

-Karl