This makes sense, but thinking about it, it doesn't seem plausible.

If I were whitelisting user agents, there are three ways I'd consider doing it.

Explicit full string:
* "Mozilla/5.0 QGIS/3.4.3-Madeira" - except of course that'd break next time someone updates QGIS by even a point version. So I doubt anyone is doing that; too much maintenance. And if they *are* doing this, well then they'll have to update their whitelist with the new user agent on the new release whether it includes "Mozilla" or not.

* Some sort of regexp looking for that structure (i.e. "Mozilla/5.0 QGIS/[0-9].[0-9]...") but allow any set of numbers. I can't conceive of when this would be the best option or even a "good" option - it's just asking for problems with version numbers (what happens when QGIS gets to double-digits in any version field for instance?). I don't doubt it may solve a particular problem somewhere maybe, but I would hope there wouldn't be many using this method (and of course, this is assuming that the "Mozilla" is part of the regex).

* Search the user agent for the string "QGIS". I do some things that look at user-agents and this is what I do. It's easily the simplest and definitely the most fool-proof way to validate a client is at least claiming to be QGIS.

So I'd suggest this is probably not something to worry about.
Cheers,
Jonathan


On 2019-02-24 22:44, Nyall Dawson wrote:
On Sun, 24 Feb 2019 at 04:38, Jonathan Moules
<jonathan-li...@lightpear.com> wrote:
Hi Richard,

I don't think without more information it's clear precisely what QGIS
should change to help them?

Indeed, personally I'm still not sure what the current problem is for
them. I get that they have some over-users of their service and need to
curtail this (a very tricky problem), but what's their current solution
and how does a user-agent change help it?

I'd suggest against QGIS using different user-agents for destinations as
was suggested earlier in the thread because down that road lies madness
(it's a highly opaque thing that /will/ bite people as they try and
debug issues).
My main concern is possible regressions if we flip to a
"less-standard" user agent. It's highly likely that there's servers
out there which block requests based on user agent whitelists, so by
changing the user agent across the whole app we'd potentially be
blocking access to these servers.

Nyall

Cheers,

Jonathan


On 23/02/2019 11:17, Richard Duivenvoorde wrote:
For what I understand, they use some cookie-based trick to help maintain
their QOS (and then to make it possible to throttle a very demanding web
application?).

This made sense to me. Also because I really do not envy maintainers of
such services: it is hard to keep up such free services (as an example
(see irc log) he mentioned that certain transportation software started
to poll the reverse geocoding every second in every car). I think it's
pretty important for us to have OSM, and be helpfull to them.
But if Firefishy/Grant is willing to give more details (he is in bcc)
that would be great.

Regards,

Richard


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