https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=527581

--- Comment #6 from [email protected] ---
After investigate I respond to myself : 

"Why is Mozilla/5.0 banned by Flickr?"

Nobody can answer on Flickr's behalf (it's a server-side configuration choice),
but the most likely explanation is:

1. A bare Mozilla/5.0 is a bot fingerprint, not a browser's. No real browser
ever sends such a short User-Agent: actual browsers send complete strings like
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 ...
Chrome/155.0.0.0 Safari/537.36. A User-Agent reduced to just Mozilla/5.0 is the
typical signature of a script lazily pretending to be a browser — one of the
most common markers used by scrapers and automation tools. Anti-bot systems
(WAFs like Cloudflare/Akamai) therefore filter it out as a priority.

2. It's Qt's default User-Agent. QNetworkAccessManager sends Mozilla/5.0 when
the application doesn't set one — exactly digiKam's case. Flickr most likely
deployed a filtering rule on www.flickr.com/services/rest/ on October 22, 2026
that blocks generic/incomplete User-Agents, which instantly broke all
unconfigured Qt clients (hence the two KDE bugs, 527578 and 527581, reported
the same day, with the latter absorbing the former as a duplicate).

3. Why a 502 instead of a 403? A blocking rule applied at a gateway/proxy level
often manifests as a "Bad Gateway" rather than a clean error code, consistent
with filtering happening upstream of the REST service.

Practical conclusion for the bug:

The fix on digiKam's side is simple and legitimate: set an explicit,
informative User-Agent, e.g. digiKam/9.1.0 (https://www.digikam.org), on the
Flickr module's requests (Robert's curl test with -A "digiKam" already confirms
it works). It's good API practice anyway: providers ask for an identifiable
User-Agent so they can distinguish applications, measure their traffic, and
reach out if problems arise. A developer could also report the change to Flickr
(SmugMug) via their API forum, but the digiKam-side fix is still needed for
already-shipped versions.

Best regards

Gilles Caulier

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