From 164e9ea737aa47ae7f75879fbd2000a8249592f2 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: chris48s Date: Thu, 6 Aug 2020 19:15:11 +0100 Subject: [PATCH] add guidance about scraping and unofficial APIs (#5393) --- CONTRIBUTING.md | 6 +++++- 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md index e46d67e418..3f385663c3 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md @@ -98,11 +98,15 @@ There are three places to get help: ## Badge guidelines - Shields.io hosts integrations for services which are primarily - used by developers or which are widely used by developers + used by developers or which are widely used by developers. - The left-hand side of a badge should not advertise. It should be a lowercase _noun_ succinctly describing the meaning of the right-hand side. - Except for badges using the `social` style, logos should be _turned off by default_. +- Badges should not obtain data from undocumented or reverse-engineered API endpoints. +- Badges should not obtain data by scraping web pages - these are likely to break frequently. + Whereas API publishers are incentivised to maintain a stable platform for their users, + authors of web pages have no such incentive. ## Badge URLs