Why am I getting an error saying that I have viewed too many pages?

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When you open "too many" pages in a short space of time, you get frozen out for a while - which is not a bad thing to stop indiscriminate misuse of the site.

However, when you look at photos, each new photo seems to count as a tick on the opening new pages meter. If a celeb has 300 photos, to look at the lot is going to get you locked out, unless you spend a long lingering look at each one.

Is there any way of excluding photos from the "opened a new page" count meter?
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BillR55

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Posted 7 years ago

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7 years ago
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Emperor, Champion

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I must admit I never even knew there was such a thing and have sometimes opened up a dozen in a short space of time without even thinking about it. I assume the feature is there to stop automated scraping of content and, if so, then they'll want it to operate on the photo galleries as elsewhere. As you can use the photos as a slideshow there probably isn't any need to open up 300 new tabs - you'd only do that if you wanted to look at a handful of the available photographs (I've done it myself), which shouldn't trigger any such warnings.

Now I'm off to try and replicate this...
2013-05-05T16:12:27+00:00
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Dan Dassow, Champion

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IMDb implemented this feature a long time ago when they were having performance issues on the site. I've run into it a few times in the past when I quickly loaded pages. The IMDb technical staff also implemented this to make it more difficult to screen scrape the site. IMDb has made special arrangements with Google, Microsoft and other search engine companies to allow indexing of IMDb's content.

I would be careful in trying to replicate this problem, since you could have your IP address locked out permanently.
2013-05-06T03:14:19+00:00
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Emperor, Champion

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I went to a BBQ instead, so am safe.
7 years ago
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BillR55

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When you use photos as a slide show, each "slide" seems to register as the opening of a new page. I was stopped in mid-stream of using a slide show to be told that I had "opened" too many new pages.

I am fairly sure that this is an unexpected feature, and the development crew would wish to find a work-around if that was possible.

(We do not seem to have any simple method of letting the development crew know that their system has unexpected features).
7 years ago
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bluesmanSF, Champion

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Posting here is the new way to report issues. The previous way was the Help Desk contact form from which messages would be forwarded to appropriate staff/departments.
7 years ago
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BillR55

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I am new to this method of reporting issues. My bad. :)
2013-05-05T17:35:52+00:00
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bluesmanSF, Champion

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No worries...it's new to all of us! Staff comes by, pretty much daily, though maybe less on weekends. They'll send on problems they can't solve to the right folks or let us know if it's known and in the works.
7 years ago
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Giancarlo Cairella, Official Rep

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Official Response
Although there are some safeguards in place to prevent excessive automated page retrieval, which puts undue strain on our system, normal viewing/usage should not trigger them and the vast majority of users should never even see these warnings.

Other than a temporary/occasional glitch, I can only think of two reasons why this situation would occur:


  1. you are accessing the site behind a corporate firewall/proxy. If that's the case, you are potentially accessing the site from the same IP address as a number of other users, so your individual activity may not be enough to trigger any warning, but the cumulative activity of all users in your network probably is


  2. you are using some web accelerator tool or extension in your browser. Using web accelerators is not a good idea and will definitely trigger this block. For more information about web accelerators and why they are not a good practice, see: http://www.imdb.com/irony


If neither condition applies to you and you are still seeing this problem regularly, please let us know and cut and paste the full/exact error message you have received and the page/URL you were looking at when it occurred so we can investigate further.
2013-05-06T08:15:45+00:00
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Peter, Champion

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Where was that URL supposed to lead?
2013-05-06T10:50:49+00:00
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Peter, Champion

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Oh, it's here: http://www.imdb.com/help/show_leaf?irony
7 years ago
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BillR55

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It must have been a temporary glitch. Neither condition applies to me, but today I repeated the same photo search I was conducting when I got locked out for opening too many new pages in a ten minute period, and this time was allowed to peruse to my heart's content.

Should it happen again, I shall give you a head's up on it.

Thanks for your reply.

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