Put up our bot policy under http://www.dreamwidth.org/site/bot
Patch by denise.
diffs (75 lines):
diff -r 770ba3d08bab -r 746409857506 htdocs/site/bot.bml
--- /dev/null Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
+++ b/htdocs/site/bot.bml Thu Jun 24 17:37:46 2010 +0800
@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+<?page
+body<=
+<?_code
+{
+ # Dreamwidth Bot Policy
+ #
+ # Authors:
+ # Denise Paolucci <[email protected]>
+ # Mark Smith <[email protected]>
+ #
+ # Copyright (c) 2010 by Dreamwidth Studios, LLC.
+ #
+ # This program is NOT free software or open-source; you can use it as an
+ # example of how to implement your own site-specific extensions to the
+ # Dreamwidth Studios open-source code, but you cannot use it on your site
+ # or redistribute it, with or without modifications.
+ #
+
+ use strict;
+
+ my $ret;
+
+ $ret .= <<PAGE;
+
+<p>We welcome people writing bots and clients that make use of our APIs and do
cool things with our data! In order to balance the needs of client/bot authors
and the needs of our users, though, we've set forth some general guidelines
that bot authors should keep in mind.</p>
+
+<p>If you have a question that isn't covered here, please <a
href='http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/submit'>contact us</a> with details
about your planned use. We're happy to work with you to do neat projects,
including fixing problems on our end and making more public data available
through our APIs. Just ask.</p>
+
+<h2>General Guidelines</h2><br />
+
+<p>The overall guidelines for bot/tool authors are pretty simple:</p>
+
+<ul><li>Good clients send a proper user-agent (or other info string) that
includes a contact email address. That will let us contact you if there are any
problems.</li>
+<li>Be kind to the system! Rate-limit your requests, and try to cache data
whenever possible.</li>
+<li>Don't screen-scrape the HTML/BML output of the site. If you can't do
something you want to do through an API, let us know, and we'll try to add an
API for it.</li>
+<li>Try to avoid asking for users' passwords. If there's something you can't
do through the protocol or through our APIs, let us know, and we'll add it. If
you have to ask for users' passwords, you should tell people what you'll do
with them, and warn users to change their passwords before and after they
access your client if they're worried.</li>
+</ul><br />
+
+<h2>Client Applications</h2><br />
+
+<p>A client application is defined as a tool that runs under the control of an
end user (whether as a downloadable program or an in-browser object).</p>
+
+<p>Generally, we don't restrict these tools. From time to time, we may need to
restrict some of the API methods they use, if there's too much load on the
site. We won't do this unless it's absolutely necessary to preserve the proper
functioning of the site, and only on a temporary basis.</p><br />
+
+<h2>Third Party Sites/Utilities</h2><br />
+
+<p>We place more restrictions on things that fall into this category, since
they have the potential to seriously impact site load. We're here to serve our
users (which includes client applications), but third-party sites that scrape
data sources aren't our primary audience.</p>
+
+<p>Generally speaking, if your site is going to be small and access Dreamwidth
infrequently, you can go right ahead and do it. (Yes, these terms are
purposefully vague -- use your best judgement, and contact us with any
questions.) If your use becomes a problem, we'll contact you and let you know
that your particular tool is turning out to be a load problem. This is one of
the reasons why it's so critical to include contact information in your user
agent.</p>
+
+<p>If you intend to run a service (or your service gets popular), and you're
making frequent requests, contact us and let us know. This will let us examine
your tool and see what changes we can make on our end to better support your
use, and what changes we can suggest in your tool to be gentler on the
site.</p><br />
+
+<h2>IP Rate Limiting</h2><br />
+
+<p>From time to time, you may find your IP address temporarily banned, if we
determine that your site is hitting our servers too frequently or causing too
much of a traffic or load spike. In this case, please contact us and let us
know the IP that's been banned so we can work out a solution.</p>
+
+PAGE
+
+ return $ret;
+}
+_code?>
+<=body
+title=><?_code return "Dreamwidth Bot Policy" _code?>
+head<=
+ <style type='text/css'>
+<!--
+#content ul li {list-style: disc; margin-left: 3em; margin-bottom: 5px; }
+-->
+</style>
+<=head
+page?>
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