It appears that “export” on the search results page does not work if the user is not logged in.
Tom
Hi Tom,
Your finding is correct. Users now need to be logged in to download data.
This change was made carefully and with respect for AAVSO’s long tradition of open data. We continue to provide data freely to the astronomical community, we simply now require users to log in first.
In 2022 and 2023, two different issues came to light that influenced the design of the new data download tool.
The first came from a report to the Board showing that about 42% of AAVSO data downloads were completely anonymous. While we could see which stars were being accessed, we had no information about how those data were being used or cited. That made it difficult to demonstrate the scientific impact of our programs or to communicate to our observers how their contributions advance science. While we didn’t take immediate action to resolve this issue, we noted it as a clear deficiency in the old application’s design.
The second issue involved system performance. In early 2023, the AAVSO experienced a series of slowdowns and outages across its website. At one point, our website, applications, and VSX were down or significantly degraded for nearly a week. We traced the problem to heavy bot traffic from various AI companies scraping data. To address this, we deployed a variety of polite measures (e.g. updating robots.txt to include rate limiting suggestions); however, several bad bots persisted. Ultimately, we deployed a firewall to throttle and eventually block automated requests, but that also affected legitimate researchers who were downloading data through scripts.
When designing the new data download application, we took both of these issues into account. The best solution was to require users to either authenticate directly or use an API key when downloading data programmatically.
While this is a change from how things worked before, we believe it’s a step in the right direction. It will allow us to better track data usage, identify which datasets are most valuable, and maybe even link downloads to published papers (this last one is a stretch though). It also lays the foundation for authenticated programmatic access through API keys, enabling researchers to integrate AAVSO data directly into their workflows while keeping our systems stable and reliable for everyone.
Kind regards,
Brian
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There needs to be an informative message instead of silent failure. I had to help a scientist who didn’t know why she couldn’t export.
@tcalderw Yes, it should not fail silently and this issue will be resolved within two weeks.