[Tools-discuss] Too aggressive rate limiting for mailinglist web archives inhibits normal use

[Erik Auerswald <[e-mail]>]

Hi,

I have been reading IETF mailing lists via the web archive for quite some
time now.  Since today, I experience problems created by too restrictive
rate limiting.  Skimming over the subjects of the emails from the last
few days of a list with a spurt of activity triggers the rate limit.

This skimming uses the keyboard, i.e., I press cursor down to look at
the next email subject.  This automatically loads the email body as well,
even if I do not intend to read it.  Using the mouse to hit the invisible
scroll bar of the small (only 4 messages) window is quite hard for me
and thus not an acceptable UI.  Using the keyboard for navigation seems
to be the intended UI for actual use by most.

The rate limiting shows as an addition of many "Show header" links in
the body of the selected email on every key press.  Only a reload of
the web page provides the actual error message:

     Error 1015
     You are being rate limited

     What happened?
     The owner of this website (mailarchive.ietf.org) has banned you
     temporarily from accessing this website.

     [...]

     [...] Performance & security by Cloudflare

Please consider increasing the rate limit to allow normal interactive use.

Please also consider reporting the actual rate limit and the duration
of the ban as part of the error message.

Please also consider reporting the error message during normal interactive
use of the web page instead of only after reloading the page.

Thanks,
Erik