What constitutes abuse?
Making an undue number of requests in a short span of time, or regularly exceeding a request quota during "normal" use.
Guidelines for polling
We realize that a great many applications will need to regularly make calls to see if some event has occurred on one of the Trilogy sites.
Examples:
- A user gained/lost reputation
- A question was answered
- New questions - in general, or within a tag or a search query - were posted
- ... and many more
However, polling can incur considerable overhead especially if done too aggressively. So, to lay down some hard guidelines...
If you're application is making identical requests more than once a minute it is probably going to be considered abusive.
Another way to think of it, if you're using more than 15% of your daily request quota simply polling for new activity you're being needlessly aggressive.
What constitutes an "identical" request?
Exactly the same method and query parameters. You don't need to wait a minute before fetching the 2nd page of a request, for example, but you do need to wait a minute between calls to say the /questions
method.
/questions
results. Is allowing a manual refresh considered abusive? I can imagine some users tapping it way more than once per minute. Do we need to put a throttle on these types of things?