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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

In the particular case of Wikipedia, I think they check User-Agent to prevent people from unthinkingly wasting gigabytes of bandwidth scraping Wikipedia via tools like wget. In Wikipedia's case, better ways exist to download large quantities of their content in a more usable form.

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They may do that ('though requesting a single article works fine), but it's not very smart. Throttling heavy users - possibly returning 429 with a link to the download pages - would make much more sense. It's not like wget users can't change their UA.

  bbot@magnesium:~> wget http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_yen
  --2012-07-15 13:54:29--  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_yen
  Resolving en.wikipedia.org... 208.80.154.225, 2620:0:861:ed1a::1
  Connecting to en.wikipedia.org|208.80.154.225|:80... connected.
  HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
  Length: 203481 (199K) [text/html]

wget uses the "wget/version" useragent.

Yes, I am aware. The point of my comment is that Wikipedia obviously does not block wget.

The point is that if it becomes a problem they'll just block that particular useragent.

The point is that you can use -U to specify arbitrary user-agent strings, and -E robots=off to ignore robots.txt.

User-agent blocking is completely braindead. It does nothing at all. The fact that somebody in 2012 can possibly think it works is astounding to me.

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