Goodreads Librarians Group discussion

note: This topic has been closed to new comments.
114 views
Questions (not edit requests) > 403 Forbidden message when searching by ISBN

Comments Showing 1-7 of 7 (7 new)    post a comment »
dateUp arrow    newest »

message 1: by David (last edited Aug 21, 2024 02:37PM) (new)

David Stewart | 39 comments I've just searched for a book I have by ISBN, it is in the database and appears in the drop-down menu, but when I click on it to view the book page I get a "403 Forbidden" page. Is this a known issue that will (hopefully) be fixed soon?

Edit: searching for the book by title allows me to add the book (but not the correct edition) but every book page is giving me the error...


message 2: by Scott (new)

Scott | 8586 comments please contact support for site functionality issues.


message 3: by mirabilos (new)

mirabilos | 32 comments JFYI, I’m getting 403 on all individual book pages, but the other pages seem to work, so it’s not just you.


message 4: by Kate (new)

Kate K (bookate) | 68 comments Ffs GoodReads has become such a joke
Its barely functional anymore


message 5: by William (new)

William Zard (w_i_zard) | 30 comments I've been seeing this too. It seems to be a problem with User-Agent filtering. At least one thing they are filtering and redirecting to 403 are Linux-based user agents. I contacted support and sent them this:


Whenever I try to look at any book detail page I get a 403 Forbidden. The rest of the site works fine.

Firefox 129.0, Ubuntu Linux

This appears to be a mistaken acess rule in your web server because it seems to reject any User-Agent string containing "X11" - This is A) something users can alter if they like and B) going to be common to all linux users.

Rejected with 403 Forbidden:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0

Passing with 200 OK:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0
Mozilla/5.0 (X1; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:129.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/129.0

Forbidding user agents like this offers zero security vs bad actors and ruins user experience for some users.




message 6: by Kate (new)

Kate K (bookate) | 68 comments Well done William
The volunteer librarians arent just doing all the cataloging ourselves anymore, now were also doing the debugging - still unpaid of course


message 7: by Monica, Librarian Moderator (new)

Monica M | 274 comments Mod
This bug has been fixed.

For future reference, this is not a Librarians Group issue. For general site queries, please either check Goodreads Help (https://help.goodreads.com), or you may wish to use the Contact Us page (http://www.goodreads.com/about/contac...). Closing thread.


back to top
This topic has been frozen by the moderator. No new comments can be posted.