The curl Download Wizard is broken

[bagder]

When clicking through it, it does not actually list any alternatives.

I don't know since when.

I believe that maybe this wizard has served its purpose and can be retired now without many complaints. To also save us from having to figure out the problem and fix it.

Reported-by: Max Schulze via email

[dfandrich]

As browsers reduce the information shared in the User-Agent: string, there's less and less available for the wizard to use for its wizardry. There are potentially some workarounds, but they can start getting complicated. I think you're probably right in just retiring it.

It would be interesting to see how often people were using it, even just counts from the origin server at the other end of the cache. But, who knows when it broke so there won't be any results past the first link in recent logs. If you have older HTTP logs, I'm curious to see some stats.

[bagder]

Grepping the logs on the origin server:

$ zstdgrep /dlwiz curl.se-access.log-20240424.zst | wc -l
1953
$ zstdgrep /dlwiz curl.se-access.log-20240423.zst | wc -l
2926
$ zstdgrep /dlwiz curl.se-access.log-20240422.zst | wc -l
1648
$ zstdgrep /dlwiz curl.se-access.log-20240421.zst | wc -l
970

[dfandrich]

Wow, that's a lot of use. But, if it's anything like my site, it's almost all robots.

[bagder]

On the 23rd, which had the most number of dlwiz request those were 0.94% of all hits. And yes, a fair amount of those 2926 hits were bots. I quick look says maybe up to 10%. Due to extensive caching of most content in the front-ends, there is reason to suspect that 0.94% is also a gross over-estimation of what share of users actually use the download wizard.

The Fastly stats tells us that the curl website serves 720 million requests/day.

[bagder]

by accident I have 4 log files left from 2023-08-19 to 2023-08-22. Back in those days, dlwiz was accessed 1492, 1883, 700 and 877 times.

[bagder]

I removed the wizard, so we don't have to fix it...