launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Sep 21, 2009 at 7:42 AM, Graham Binns <graham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.
>

I seem to remember this reason being revoked at a voice discussion in the past.

In any case, it sounds like people are agreeing: we can apply the same
techniques for dealing with abusive API use as we do for abusive web
use, so we ought to provide anonymous access to the API.

I've updated the wiki page with a link to the bug.

jml