In T378536, we explored an approach to request link-recommendations on the fly. While that approach works in principle, it does have the side effect of creating additional requests to the Wikimedia Link Recommendation Service in a manner that is affected by users.
This opens the possibility for a malicious user to overwhelm the service by triggering too many requests.
This tasks exist for exploring and implementing mitigations and make loading link-recommendations on the fly viable in productions.
Possible strategies to explore:
- storing for which pages no recommendations are available and not re-requesting them
- limiting the set of users who can call the API more strictly to the same set of users that are provided the module by default
- aggressively rate-limiting the requests to the API on a per-user basis (1 request per minute?), or per feature basis (PoolCounter?)
- ...