Bug 34745 - ThingISBN broken: User agent blocked
Summary: ThingISBN broken: User agent blocked
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: Koha
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Architecture, internals, and plumbing (show other bugs)
Version: Main
Hardware: All All
: P5 - low normal (vote)
Assignee: Bugs List
QA Contact: Testopia
URL:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2023-09-08 14:39 UTC by Owen Leonard
Modified: 2023-10-07 20:06 UTC (History)
0 users

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Attachments
Bug 34745: FOR TESTING - ThingISBN broken: User agent blocked (1.33 KB, patch)
2023-09-08 14:53 UTC, Owen Leonard
Details | Diff | Splinter Review

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Description Owen Leonard 2023-09-08 14:39:27 UTC
Requests to LibraryThing's ThingISBN service are being blocked. Koha tries to access a url like this:

https://www.librarything.com/api/thingISBN/0439139600

...which opens fine in a browser, but triggers the response "WARNING: URL Request Failed 403 Forbidden" when Koha tries it.

Koha is currently sending the user agent "libwww-perl/6.52" and if I use Firefox's developer tools to load the page with that set as a custom user agent I get a CloudFlare-generated "access denied" message.

I see other CloudFlare customers complaining about this, so it may just be a default. Should we ask LibraryThing to change their configuration? Should we send a less obtrusive user agent with the request?
Comment 1 Owen Leonard 2023-09-08 14:53:58 UTC
Created attachment 155436 [details] [review]
Bug 34745: FOR TESTING - ThingISBN broken: User agent blocked

This patch corrects the LibraryThing URL to use https instead of http
and adds a custom agent string to the initialization of LWP::UserAgent:
"Mozilla/5.0"

This is a test to confirm that the a different user agent string might
allow the ThingISBN to work again.