WorldCat warning

[Tawnya]

You know how a few weeks ago we were talking about issues with WorldCat? Today I experienced something new and wondered if anyone has seen it. I do not have an issue with the main page, nor the result page from doing a search. The problem starts when I hit the Formats & Editions links. The page loads...partially. Some of the "covers" start to blink rapidly. The bottom of the page jumps around as well.

Anyone who is epileptic is going to have to be careful. I have other medical conditions that cause spells. The blinking brought one on.

[Renske]

That sounds bad, good you're warning about it.

Also, Worldcat is putting more data behind a log-in. I noticed it for the other editions and materials link a few weeks ago and this week or so the details section of the book page is now also behind a log-in. So without an account you can no longer get the page numbers or the other half of an ISBN-10/ISBN-13 pair, the two bits of information I look up the most on worldcat.

[Tawnya]

I just checked, and it is still happening. I notified WC that night, but haven't heard back. I even took a video. I just learned how to do that, so perhaps I did it wrong. It played for me.

I got an account the first day, so I always log in. In fact, I never logged out. But a few months ago, it started making me re-login every three hours or so.

I think I know why it keeps asking us if we are human. Another site I visited uses cloudflare as well. They mentioned the upswing in bots trying to steal info for AI and such.

[Dobby]

Thanks for the warning, Tawnya. I won't check it out - the blinking and flashing would definitely set off a vertigo attack for me. I'll avoid WC until they get it fixed.

I noticed the same about the log-in requirements. I've had an account there for several years but it was only recently that they started requiring the re-login. I wondered about that - I had heard about the AI-bot web scraping but it didn't occur to me that WC might be affected.

[Tawnya]

WorldCat (technically it was OCLC Support) notified me that they fixed the issue. I logged on and everything seems to be back to normal.

[Dobby]

Excellent news! Thanks!