IVOA-science in Softid

[Thomas Boch]

Hi Markus and all,

thank you for this effort, I think it's a step in the right direction, 
and we will adapt Aladin Desktop user agent accordingly, whatever is 
ultimately decided.

I'd like to bring up the topic of web-based clients (typically from 
Javascript in the browser) such as Aladin Lite or web portals. As you 
surely know, such clients don't have the freedom to override browser 
user-agent and set up a custom user-agent header. I think it would be a 
shame if this use case was not taken into account. Can we envisage to 
have an alternative header keyword (X-User-agent?) that could be used 
for web-based clients. It would of course the op-purpose syntax as the 
one you suggest.

Any comments on this?

Thanks, have all a nice week-end.


Thomas

Le 23/12/2025 à 11:02, Markus Demleitner via dal a écrit :
> Dear Colleagues,
>
> As a small piece in the puzzle of how to deal with stupid crawlers
> overloading our services, I have occasionally suggested a small
> secret handshake between legitimate clients and our servers in hopes
> that might be enough to avoid the APIkeycopalypse.
>
> I am, indeed, rather convinced that "follow a standard" would already
> work pretty well to keep out most "AI crawlers", and that
> quasi-standard could be our note on operational identification
> of software components <http://ivoa.net/documents/Notes/softid/>
> (which has quite a few other use cases, too, so if you are writing VO
> clients or servers, please have a look).
>
> For clients, this note has the provision of an IVOA comment.  So far,
> the idea has been that validators would have something like
>
>    User-Agent: STILTS/3.1-4 (IVOA-test http://validators.org/results) Java/1.8.0_181
>
> in their request headers (crawlers would give IVOA-copy), and
> diligent beancounters would remove such requests (done for validation
> in this case) from their usage analyses (as questionable as these may
> be even then).
>
> So far, the standard said that "normal" usage should not give any
> purpose.  Now, giving "science" as a purpose would exactly be such a
> follow-the-standards handshake.
>
> I have now written up a proposal for how this would look like as
> a PR against softid: <https://github.com/ivoa/softid/pull/1>.
>
> What do people think?  As a client, would you adopt it?  As a server,
> can you imagine any use for IVOA-science in user agents?
>
> If sufficiently many people feel this is a good idea: Perhaps it's
> then time to try and get softid endorsed?
>
> Thanks[*],
>
>           Markus
>
> [*] Enjoy your holidays if you have them!
>
>
>
>
>