Open Bug 1944264 Opened 22 days ago Updated 9 days ago

www.mib.org.uk - Error when checking a vehicle registration

Categories

(Web Compatibility :: Site Reports, defect, P1)

Desktop
Windows 10

Tracking

(Webcompat Priority:P1, Webcompat Score:8, firefox134 affected, firefox135 affected, firefox136 affected)

Webcompat Priority P1
Webcompat Score 8
Tracking Status
firefox134 --- affected
firefox135 --- affected
firefox136 --- affected

People

(Reporter: rbucata, Unassigned)

References

()

Details

(Keywords: webcompat:needs-contact, webcompat:site-report, Whiteboard: [webcompat-source:web-bugs])

User Story

platform:windows,mac,linux,android
impact:workflow-broken
configuration:general
affects:all
branch:release
diagnosis-team:networking
user-impact-score:800

Environment:
Operating system: Windows 10
Firefox version: Firefox 134.0

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Navigate to: https://enquiry.navigate.mib.org.uk/checkyourvehicle
  2. Enter a valid registration plate (UK)
  3. Accept the terms and condition and click on the "Check" button
  4. Observe

Expected Behavior:
Results are returned

Actual Behavior:
Error message is displayed

Notes:

  • Reproduces regardless of the status of ETP
  • Reproduces in firefox-nightly, and firefox-release
  • Does not reproduce in chrome

Created from https://github.com/webcompat/web-bugs/issues/147547

Since nightly and release are affected, beta will likely be affected too.
For more information, please visit BugBot documentation.

The server sends us a 403 to the POST request, let's figure out if there's a difference in the requests we send.

Severity: -- → S2
User Story: (updated)
Webcompat Priority: --- → P1
Webcompat Score: --- → 8
Priority: -- → P1

There seems to be some sort of server side rate limiting.
I opened the page, tried to lookup "AB12CDE" a couple of times. It started failing after the third time.
In Chrome I had the same experience.
Not sure how the rate limiting is enforced. Clearing cookies and force-refreshing the page don't seem to make it work.
It does start working after a minute or so.
@Raul, are you seeing a different behaviour in Chrome vs Firefox?

Flags: needinfo?(rbucata)

Indeed, for me, it fails on Chrome, after the 4th attempt (sometimes on the 5th, sometimes on the 3rd), but it works as expected the very first time. Firefox fails from the very 1st attempt.

Flags: needinfo?(rbucata)

Firefox fails from the very 1st attempt.

For me it works OK the first few requests (on Linux).
I tried it on Windows, and indeed, in Firefox it failed the first time. However, it seems to works after changing the user-agent to Chrome.
Unless there's some other factor here that I'm not seeing, I'd say this is a server-side problem.

Seems like this is hosted by https://www.imperva.com/, so this might be some server-side bot detection or something close. We should probably just reach out here :/

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