Server has stopped obeying Accept-encoding header

Question

Either today or yesterday, besides /questions/tagged having disappeared, the server started ignoring the Accept-encoding header:

 Ligação estabelecida com 69.59.196.211 na porta 80 GET /0.8/questions/?tagged=C HTTP/1.0 Host: api.stackoverflow.com Accept-encoding: none   HTTP/1.1 200 OK Server: nginx Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:42:20 GMT Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8 Connection: close Cache-Control: private Content-Encoding: gzip X-AspNetMvc-Version: 2.0 X-RateLimit-Max: 10000 X-RateLimit-Current: 9992 X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727 Content-Length: 5302 (content follows) 

If gzip encoding is being enforced, the server should send a 406 response:

If an Accept-Encoding field is present in a request, and if the server cannot send a response which is acceptable according to the Accept-Encoding header, then the server SHOULD send an error response with the 406 (Not Acceptable) status code. (RFC 2616, section 14.3)

Answer 1

See Supported Platforms

gzip is being enforced with predjudice.

Answer 2

A 406 response breaks* a ton of proxies. In effect, if we strictly follow the standard we prevent many people on corporate networks from accessing the API.

We found this out the hard way.

_{*Technically these proxies strip out Accept-Encoding causing a 406 to always occur.}