Rate Limited Request (429 error)
We apologize, but you have triggered rate limiting by our cloud service provider.
This could be for one of many reasons.
- You accessed more than thirty pages in less than a minute.
- You have written a bot that accessed too many files too quickly.
- Multiple people are accessing the site at the same time via your IP address.
- You are an employee of ESPN.
Generally, we block traffic that we think is from a bot for an hour and traffic that we think is a real user for five minutes.
See our Bot Traffic page or our SR and Data Use Page.
Report an issue with our site or perhaps our twitter account.
Bot Policy
Sports Reference is primarily dependent on ad revenue, so we must ensure that actual people using web browsers have the best possible experience when using this site. Unfortunately, non-human traffic, ie bots, crawlers, scrapers, can overwhelm our servers with the number of requests they send us in a short amount of time. Therefore we are implementing rate limiting on the site. We will attempt to keep this page up to date with our current settings.
Currently we will block users sending requests to:
- our sites more often than twenty requests in a minute.
- This is regardless of bot type and construction and pages accessed.
- If you violate this rule your session will be in jail for an hour.
Why Not Provide an API?
Most of our data comes from third parties who sell the data to us. As part of our agreements with them we can not provide the data available as a download on our site. We are aware that an API would mitigate some issues, but it's not our business model. If you want to get data for a low price, we suggest NatStat.com.
For more information on data use of SR sites, see our Data Use page.
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