[OSM-dev] Important information for OpenPisteMap users

[Steve Hill]

Some OpenPisteMap bits are changing and this may affect third party 
software.

1. The tiles have moved to http://tiles.openpistemap.org.  They are 
currently being served from the old location as well, but this will be 
discontinued in the following phases:
i) After a few weeks, tiles served from the old location will get a 
"please update your software" watermark applied to them.
ii) A few weeks later, the old location will start returning "404 Not 
Found"
If you are operating a web site that embeds OpenPisteMap using the map.js 
and opm.js scripts served directly from the OPM server then you *probably* 
don't need to do anything.  Other software will need updating.


2. Owing to abuse by a small number of users (no, using a robot to pull
down a third of a million tiles a week is not acceptable behaviour), 
OpenPisteMap will start banning people who download more than 20,000 
tiles in a day or 40,000 in a week.  As a point of comparison, the whole 3 
Vallies resort at all zoom levels covers around 9,000 tiles, so there 
shouldn't really be much need to exceed these limits.  If you have a 
specific reason why you need to then please discuss it with me - bandwidth 
isn't free and a small number of users are disproportionately using a lot 
of it.


Also, a polite request to robot writers: it is generally considered good 
practice for robots to identify themselves in the UA string of their 
requests.  This is desiarable so that the authors of buggy/misbehaving 
robots can be contacted and therefore fixed, and also so that website 
operators can properly estimate the cost associated with various clients. 
The vast majority of robot traffic that hits OpenPisteMap spoofs a "real 
browser" UA string (most commonly Opera, but most of the common browsers 
are represented too).  If you're responsible for writing one of these 
robots, please consider fixing your software and presenting a suitable UA 
string.

-- 

  - Steve
    xmpp:steve at nexusuk.org   sip:steve at nexusuk.org   http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence