Disagree in the main. :P People blacklist agents, not whitelist, and a one-off for an agent that is NEVER abusive to a service is less likely to get crapcanned than one that shares a (base) name with 30% of the traffic.
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Thanks for the replies. I tried setting the agent to the user-agent string used by my current version of Firefox and had no trouble. (I'm still not sure why I was getting a 406 error for this podcast instead of a 403 Forbidden error, which I was getting on a number of podcasts with the default agent of "libwww-perl".) | [reply] [Watch: Dir/Any] |
You can of course do whatever you want but I encourage you to use a unique agent name and version for your script; maybe even a less whimsical one than my original suggestion. :P I meant to expand on this and forgot. It’s more transparent—I’d argue more honest—better metrics for the host, and being a good netizen, from an API standpoint, is better for everyone and, I believe, reflects well on Perl compared to some other more, uh, mercenary communities. Update: response codes are at the discretion of the host code and webserver. They are frequently not particularly sensible.
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