Originally Posted by
Steph3n
It seems that EF and KVS weren't so 'innocent' and pulling from GDS. Maybe we should all offer them a big thanks for screen scraping the united servers to no end?
I think GDS is very costly, and they won't be able to get them for what they charge, so screen scraping was really the only way to get all the info. United instead of killing the functions for everyone, should have setup a deal with KVS and EF to charge them for their usage of the site, via a special URL they can track, and charge per query, hit, etc as they agree upon. It would less cost than GDS providers, but provide full info.
Those 'screen scrapes' aren't free either, and I know this first hand, the screen scraping scripts can RAPE a server when they go out of control or aggressive on the indexing.
This change is unwelcome, but I'm gonna cut UA some slack here, for exactly the reason Steph3n stated.
Maybe UA Insider does not want to come out and say it, but if the reason they are killing this info is to deal with tools such as EF that were hitting the UA servers hard for this info and then re-selling it, I'd have a hard time blaming UA for saying "enough is enough". I also don't see an easy way around this. Requiring a user to solve a Captcha is one way to go, but thinking about it, there's no obvious, elegant way that I can see to integrate that into the site, and perhaps after a cost/benefit analysis, it just didn't seem worth it.