OSDev.org

I used to follow the feed for the Recent changes page in my RSS reader, in order to collect and check weekly for changes in the wiki and in general staying up to date on what is happening with the OS development world without having to resort to checking the #osdev tag on GitHub Explore and social media in general. It is not exactly a hidden feature, as there is a link that says "Atom" in the sidebar of the page with the orange thingy next to it that can be clicked.

It turns out that the recent lack of updates for the last couple of months is explained by a Cloudfront wall that is set on front of the endpoint, therefore all my RSS reader gets is a page that does not look like a feed, so it errors and goes away, because my RSS reader is scared of the JavaScripts. I work with JS in my day job and I understand why it would be scared of it, I'd be too.

Now, from a security point of view, this is working as expected. A daemon running on a private server with a static IP is periodically polling an URL to take whatever it says and dump it on a local database. This is the dictionary definition of a scraper. However, I was under the impression that the world had settled 20 years ago that RSS was considered an accepted use case*, as basically that's the whole purpose of adding an RSS feed into a website.

From a functional point of view, I am confused and have questions. Is this intentional? Shall I give up and just use a browser like a normal person? Why bothering then with having the "Atom" link in the sidebar for the Special:RecentChanges page? (unless the answer is that MediaWiki does not allow disabling it)

___
(*) Maybe artificial intelligence and having multi million companies ingesting content created by humans in order to later sell stochastic parrots that regurgitate the exact content to the same users who wrote them has forced the world to revise this. I don't know.