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docs: record why the account was suspended — verification, not fetching

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The account was suspended on 2026-08-17 for "spam", during the session
that built this tooling. Both fetching docs were confidently wrong about
what the risk was, so both now carry the correction.

docs/jdownloader.md said the ban vector is instagram.com requests, which
is right, and implied that meant per-post metadata fetching, which is
only part of it. The suspension came from read-only verification:
automated browser scrolling to enumerate profile grids (~18 paginated
loads per profile, done twice on one after a selector bug), repeated
--simulate and -j passes over the same profiles, per-post /p/ fetches
while testing filename formats, and an aborted sync that re-ran every
listing pass before dying. None of that produced a file, and together it
rivalled the real sync for request count.

The rules that follow are in docs/gallery-dl.md: verify against the
archive rather than the live site, count read-only work against the same
budget, treat the first CDN 429 as the end of the session rather than a
pacing knob, and cache probe_live so a restart does not re-enumerate
everything. The warning order was CDN 429, then 400 on the highlights
tray, then suspension.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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ergosteur
2026-08-17 12:56:00 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 087304243e
commit 7a085d2272
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docs/jdownloader.md
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@@ -18,7 +18,23 @@ Concretely, from this archive: `rivvsofficial` has 188 post-metadata files, so
backfilling it cost 188 API requests for one 605-file profile. That's the ban
vector. Downloading the 238 photos was never the problem.
Instaloader got this account banned once. JDownloader with throttling has not.
Instaloader got this account banned once. JDownloader with throttling did not.
> **The account was suspended anyway, on 2026-08-17, for "spam".** Not by
> JDownloader, and not by downloading. It was suspended during a day of
> *building and verifying* the gallery-dl replacement — automated browser
> scrolling to enumerate profile grids, repeated `--simulate` and `-j` metadata
> passes, and one aborted sync that re-ran every listing pass before dying.
>
> The framing above is right about which surface is dangerous and wrong about
> what reaches it. **Every read of `instagram.com` counts, including the ones
> that download nothing** — and read-only work is easy not to count precisely
> because it leaves no files behind. See the post-mortem at the top of
> `docs/gallery-dl.md`.
>
> The rule that would have prevented it: *verify against the archive, never
> against the live site*, and treat the first CDN `429` as the end of the
> session rather than a pacing knob.
### What the metadata gap actually costs