This isn't so much about the user agent string, it's more about the potential high frequency of updating WebParser measures in some skins.Will do! Although I'm 100% sure it isn't caused by one of my skins as I have set the UserAgent to a browser.
By the way, such a frequent polling of a site can be:
1. intentional:
a) to get data as soon as it changes (this not really a logical reason when it comes to Nominatim or even weather providers - after all, it's not like your location continuously drifts on the planet, or the weather is changing every minute, regardless of whether some folks could be obsessed by that)
b) during the building / testing phase of a skin when the access to the resource is more frequent, if one insists in using the online web resource for tests, despite the fact that using a locally saved version of the page via the file:// URI scheme allows the same thing with no drawbacks whatsoever
2. unintentional:
a) because of bad coding or missing key details, like having a lower skin Update rate at the level of a couple of milliseconds to facilitate nice animations in the skin, but forgetting to use either a larger UpdateDivider or a larger UpdateRate in WebParser measures to account for that and bring updating such measures at a reasonable rate (example: the animated variants of a skin called Small Clean Weather, which besides the fact that they're broken and don't work, update WebParsers excessively, see here for a brief explanation and here for an easy solution to it, which can be applied to any similar skin if needed)
b) simply due to the structure of the Rainmeter featured machines, e.g. if somebody has a network of 4000 machines, each having installed and loading a Rainmeter skin querying a web resource at Windows' startup, then it's easy to have that many nearly simultaneous requests to a site just because of the initial update of all measures when the skin is loaded
Obviously, in this case, since nearly all Nominatim requests are manual (or should be, given that a saved geocode can be reused without polling the resource afterwards), needing the user to first input his location to get the corresponding geocode to use going forward, only 1.a) and 1.b) normally apply - hence the general idea of this thread. Besides malicious intent which frankly is not even about Rainmeter since it can be done from any network capable software out there anyway, it's highly unlikely that any Rainmeter user would want to consciously harm his own chances of benefitting from such a nice free service like the one provided by Nominatim (or others, for that matter). So, at worst, such mistakes are caused by the fact that due to the hobbyist nature of Rainmeter, most users or skin developers are not actual professionals to be careful at every little detail that might make improperly using some skins a problem for the providers of various services.
Statistics: Posted by Yincognito — Yesterday, 9:11 pm