Hey guys,

Whenever i contact the E621 api through my NodeJS project using the request package, it returns a 403 in the body.

I got it working now by setting the user agent header to google chrome's.

Is this the legit way to do it? It was working a couple of months ago without setting a user agent but suddenly stopped working.

Phun said:
Hey guys,

Whenever i contact the E621 api through my NodeJS project using the request package, it returns a 403 in the body.

I got it working now by setting the user agent header to google chrome's.

Is this the legit way to do it? It was working a couple of months ago without setting a user agent but suddenly stopped working.

kiranoot said:

April 28, 2016

A limit on the rate of requests has been introduced. If you are receiving 503 errors, you are hitting the request rate limit. If you are developing a client, please check for this condition and back off on the rate of requests.

If you are performing requests and receiving 403 errors, you need to include a User-Agent header with your request. Please select a user agent that identifies your project/client. Including your e621 username in the user agent is preferred so that you can be contacted if your project/client is causing problems. An example user agent that has these properties is

NewtFinder/1.0 (by kiranoot on e621)

You just need to add any user-agent header. I suspect someone was being dickish with the APIs for them to add a user-agent requirement.

Chaser said:
You just need to add any user-agent header. I suspect someone was being dickish with the APIs for them to add a user-agent requirement.

Thanks a ton chaser!

Phun said:
Hey guys,

Whenever i contact the E621 api through my NodeJS project using the request package, it returns a 403 in the body.

I got it working now by setting the user agent header to google chrome's.

Is this the legit way to do it? It was working a couple of months ago without setting a user agent but suddenly stopped working.

Please don't impersonate a browser with your user agent. It's valid, yes, but it makes it hard to contact you if something goes wrong.

KiraNoot said:
Please don't impersonate a browser with your user agent. It's valid, yes, but it makes it hard to contact you if something goes wrong.

Yes KiraNoot i've done as the help text described and changed my user agent to include my username in it. Thanks!