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?
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.
Currently opening in a browser shows a page : "Sorry, you have been blocked"
LibraryThing seems to have converted this service to an authenticated API. I understand why, but I'm curious why it was done with no apparent announcement. Also, "LibraryThing's APIs are currently disabled until further notice", posted 2022-05-16: https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/LibraryThing_APIs
Okay, not exactly authenticated... Just requires the addition of a token. And it seems to be working at the moment.