[QGIS-Developer] [Qgis-psc] Request for Change of UserAgent

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

On 23/02/2019 12.04, Jonathan Moules wrote:
> It seems to me there are a few different aspects to this.
> 
> - The convention is to stick "Mozilla 5" into user-agents for browsers
> because every other browser uses it. At this point they all pretend to
> be each other -
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1114254/why-do-all-browsers-user-agents-start-with-mozilla
> 
> 
> - Looking at a bunch of random user-agents, non-browsers don't usually
> put "Mozilla" in them (there are websites with long lists).
> 
> - For some reason OSM can't block the QGIS agent. I'm with Mathieu -
> this seems odd because it explicitly says "QGIS".
> 
> - Cookies - QGIS doesn't do this (makes sense, doesn't need them), but
> why does OSM need them? Relying on cookies alone isn't a good idea -
> many users don't allow 3rd party cookies, and many users delete cookies
> when the browser closes or even when the tab is closed (self-destructing
> cookies plugins).

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