JSON shield giving invalid result

[DavidStirling]

One of our badges recently stopped working -

It's supposed to fetch a topic count from a forum running on Discourse. The JSON URL seems to work (https://forum.image.sc/tag/cellprofiler.json) and to my understanding the expression should be $topic_list.tags.0.topic_count. However, trying to run this on a testing website generates a 403 error.

Does anyone know what's going wrong here? I'm not sure if there's a better way of testing these badges, since 'invalid' doesn't give much information.

Thanks

[chris48s]

Looks like forum.image.sc

a) bans certain user agents.
b) returns a plan text response instead of JSON if it doesn't like your user agent

$ curl "https://forum.image.sc/tag/cellprofiler.json" -A "Shields.io/2003a"
Crawler is not allowed!

$ curl "https://forum.image.sc/tag/cellprofiler.json"
Crawler is not allowed!

$ curl "https://forum.image.sc/tag/cellprofiler.json" -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:59.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/59.0"
{..snip - valid json..}

You'll have to take it up with the admins of forum.image.sc to see if you can get our UA unbanned in order to carry on using their API.

[DavidStirling]

Have had them add an exception for the shields domain, which fixed it. Thanks so much!