[R-pkg-devel] URL woes at CRAN: Anaconda edition

[Uwe Ligges]

On 30.11.2023 18:28, Aron Atkins wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 11:49 AM Dirk Eddelbuettel <edd using debian.org> wrote:
> 
>>
>> And *of course* the same URL resolves fine for me in the browser without
>> any
>> apparent redirect.  Bit of a web newb here but is there anything I can do
>> short of deleteing the badge?
> 
> 
> The badge you're referencing is hosted by a cloudflare CDN, which uses
> "magic" to return error responses to non-humans.
> 
> You can see this behavior by running curl against the URL:
> 
> curl -I https://anaconda.org/conda-forge/r-tiledb
> HTTP/2 400
> server: cloudflare
> ...
> 
> I have seen this behavior for other resources, but generally have
> experienced 403 responses.
> 
> This urlchecker issue discusses what I had seen:
> https://github.com/r-lib/urlchecker/issues/26
> 
> I do not have guidance other than to either remove the URL or add a note
> stating that the 400 errors are only presented to robots. Perhaps CRAN
> occasionally adjusts its User-Agent to avoid some of these challenges? Not
> sure.
> 
> Aron

This (status 400) underlies manual inspection and we let this pass.

Best,
Uwe Ligges