Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by kimagure 4820 days ago
How are you getting users' game lists? Are you using id/user/games?tab=all&xml=1 or something like that?

A while ago STEAM was rate limiting me to somewhere between 8-15 seconds (503's returned in between). Have you run into this at all on your end?

1 comments

It has a global rate limiter AFAIK, so it's hit and miss depending on how much load it's under.

Edit: I was trying to datamine Steam several months ago as well, but the amount of data I needed really was unrealistic for this very reason, and it would have just been bad etiquette. I imagine by having this API they're having to deal with a ridiculous number of dataminers. And that's on top of their crazy number of normal users, which I'm sure the rate limiter is there to protect.

Well, I really can't blame anyone but STEAM for this. They don't have APIs for anything other than stupid TF2/Dota2 things so it's no wonder that people scrape their pages every day.