dev.to API - returning 404 permanently once received it once.

GrahamTheDev - Mar 22 '21 - - Dev Community

Just a quick one, has anyone ever played with the "unofficial" parts of the dev.to API?

I am trying to enumerate for new users (I know, naughty but I have good intentions!) and put together a page that welcomes new users to the site automatically.

The page works fine but gathering the users is proving to be problematic.

The way I am doing it at the moment is starting at the latest userID and then looking at the next userID and seeing if the page exists using the end-point https://dev.to/api/users/{userID}.

The problem is that once that end-point returns a 404 error (as the user does not exist yet) it will always return a 404 error to my script, even when the record does exist in the future and returns a 200 status in the browser.

I thought it might be rate limiting or something but the script works fine if I skip any userIDs I have tried previously (and if it is rate limiting a 404 error is misleading)?

I have tried sending headers with cache-control: no-cache and pragma: no-cache just in case but this still happens.

I am using cURL in php.

I am currently checking for a new user every 30 seconds, but even if I change this to 10 minutes I get the same problem.

Final question: is there an API end-point that actually lists new users as that would save me polling like this.

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