Whitelist strategy and Zotero /save website

polonius916
AP recently moved to a whitelist strategy that, so far as I can tell, makes it so using the /save website no longer works on their websites, apparently the same as McClatchy websites and some others.

I wrote AP to ask about it and this is their response:

//We recently moved to a Whitelist strategy for access to APNews.com. This decision was made after careful consideration and was absolutely necessary to reduce the number of bad bots hammering our site. We realize this may impact some “good” bots and we are constantly updating the list to let them in.

That said, Zotero does not publish a list of IPs that we can list. It also appears that they are not an approved bot with Cloudflare. Many sites are moving in this direction so it would be in there (sic) benefit to share this information publicly.//

I don't pretend to understand all the technical details here, but how would Zotero respond to this? The increasing number of sites not working with the /save website is annoying (I haven't had any real problems on desktop).
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    Is there a reason you're not using the Zotero Connector to save to your library? That's going to work much better across the web.
  • polonius916
    That's a good question, of course. I am a minimalist on my phone (I only have maybe 20 apps, most of them locked by the operating system, on my phone) and find the /save option to be better for me on mobile. I use connections on the desktop exclusively, but on mobile I prefer /save.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited yesterday at 2:18pm
    Best we can say is to use the Zotero app and try saving to it via the share sheet. More and more sites aren't going to work via the /save page.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    (Though if you're on Android, the share button may not work much better, due to Android limitations. The share button on iOS is much closer to the Zotero Connector.)
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    We can look into the feasibility of having the online save features (zbib.org, /save, and Add by Identifier in the web library) become a verified bot for Cloudflare, but sites still have the option of whether to block those, and they may still be blocked by default.
  • polonius916
    Thanks. I love Zotero so much. I use it every single day both. Thanks.
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