429 Too Many Requests

Yeah, but some limit has changed. I'm using scripts that I've used for the three years I've been here, and suddenly I'm getting this all of the time. Never had an issue before. It's making the site unusable for me.

eh, i'll take the once-a-year (if that) problem if it means i get a dramatically better overall experience 99.9% of the time. plus this issue had a really easy fix.

try going into your sync settings and disabling delisted games, giveaways, and won giveaways. you might not need all three unchecked, but i was toying around and that's what ultimately ended the 429 problem.

Yes, browsing in the discussions leads to that too.

I'm getting it when doing a library check on a group with only 110 members (and, theoretically, it should mostly just be hitting the Steam API, and only touching each user profile once during the check...but not my code, so admittedly there could be some crap code in there). If I try to check for more than a couple of games in a row (which is common when searching for the best GA for a group), it locks up and I have to wait for a timeout again. It's honestly really frustrating.

Can you please lower the limits of this protection.
Even when I'm just trying to join giveaways I already run into this protection.
I just open all the giveaways in tabs I want to join, but doing it so quickly apparently is already too much for the system.
Also very useful site additions like ESGST can't be used anymore like this :(

Edit: And most recent time I ran into this blockage was just trying to browse the entered giveaways page, while having the addon ESGST active :(

prevents users from making an unusually high number of requests in a period of time. The rates are fairly generous

I got 429'ed with rate limit in my ArchiBot set at 1 request per 10 seconds with 1 open connection, I don't know what definition of "fairly generous" and "unusually high number" you're using, but it's different than the one I follow.

Could you stop destroying every single legit use case and focus on those that are actually harmful? If I wanted to make a bot that would exploit SG I'd have done it years ago without you realizing it, and no amount of rate-limits would stop me. Instead, everything you did was harming legit users opening giveaways in several tabs and otherwise using the site in a legit way.

If you want to implement rate-limiting then do it properly. Implement side-wide limit of 1 request per 2 seconds, 30 per minute or whatever else you want, announce it publicly so LEGIT users like me could adapt to them, and then start your hunt against those that do not. I don't know what values you're currently using, but they're way too high, I can't operate my group in the way I used to previously, what ArchiBot was finishing in less than a minute, each 15 minutes, now results in a constant static load to the website for 24/7, because it's unable to do its work in time, is that what you wanted? If there is one thing I can ask for then think it over and make the limits at least sane, like 1 request per 2s or something, or just ban me outright so I won't have to deal with this stupidity for good, since if you didn't realize yet, legit use cases support your users, like my group members, and not malicious individuals, those simply do not care what you're gonna say or do, they'll find a loophole anyway because they have nothing better to do than spending their whole day exploiting your site, unlike me.

You didn't listen to us when we asked you for API which would solve the problem you're trying to fix now and failing at it. I wonder if anything changed since then.

Hey cg,
This rate limit is really messing with my SGMT tool :(
My tool runs as a service, collecting data to a local DB, hence no matter how many user request hit it, all go to the local DB instead of SG (as would happen if it was a client-side tool).
So the change was obviously not meant against tools like mine (which send at most a couple of hundred requests every hour).
Yet it has made my tool unusable, as it limits it as it was a regular SteamGifts user, while the tool serves whole groups of users.

I humbly ask you to consider either:

1. Adding the IP of my tool to a whitelist/exclusion list so it's not limited/throttled.
2. If you feel uncomfortable doing that, can you at least provide me (even in a private message) with current throttling rates, so I can configure my tool to run below these reates.

I've been getting this semi-regularly, completely disconnected from my browsing habits towards the site. The only script I use is the blacklist/whitelist indicator, and the error message still'll randomly pop up even with that disabled.

Moreover, it appears on the main giveaway page as well, where the script doesn't associate icons with to begin with (and presumably thus doesn't have reason to make excessive calls, though I don't have time atm to go through the script to confirm that). It'll also rather frequently occur just when loading the website up for the first time, with a single page opened. As a sum of those issues, it has occurred on the main page on first site load without scripts active. Conversely, I can still more often than not open 20 discussion pages at once with the script active, and it doesn't blink.

Whatever is going on, I don't imagine scripts are inherently the issue, even if it is likely that they're the most prevelant trigger for the underlying issue (or have an entirely seperate issue they're based in). Is there any other reason the site would be assuming excessive data calls? As a further note, the frequency by which it occurs seems to be varying significantly day to day. An SG friend suggested that maybe there's a glitch that's associating general server load to individuals (which would at least correspond to why it seems to be most common at periods such as now, when a new Monthly is up- as per it going down for me just a minute ago).

The rates are fairly generous

So.. how exactly are they? Having that number is kinda necessary to correct any broken scripts.

Well i was not pointing fingers, just asking the whole audience if something had changed somewhere, so i could inderstand what to change to make it work.

I think basic API support could decrease load. People have already built lots of extra functionality to the site. It would be easier to query from API e.g. all giveaways for particular user instead of requesting the same data page by page and parsing through it. I don't personally use scripts but can see their utility.

You're right with this but this would not solve the problem that a lot of traffic on the site is generated by those scripts, so it would be better to prevent the requests at all instead of spreading them to a larger time frame :)

E. g. in my case the problem only occured because of some old functionality of ESGST which isn't even in use any more but still sent dozens and dozens of requests in the background without me even realizing.

That's true. We should make our own sg instead, with blackjack and hookers!
on a serious note: it would be much easier to adjust timings if cg bothered to announce exact rate limits

I would like to be able to do that, but I have no idea what the limits are to adjust to.
They can be per second, per minute, per hour, per round hour, they may be dynamic or in a sliding window...
It would take a whole lot of time and effort to reverse engineer SG to be able to understand the exact rate limits.

We'll see, I'm working on applying the limits to ESGST and seeing what can be done. It will probably only become a lot slower.