Fix TON (Tonbridge and Malling) scraper#402
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democracy.tmbc.gov.uk times out from Lambda with wreq's Firefox TLS fingerprint. The server's WAF drops the connection during the TLS handshake — the same pattern seen on FOE, GWN, SWD, DAC, LBH, NYE, EPS, NEW, WOX. Playwright uses Chromium's standard Chrome TLS fingerprint, which passes the WAF.
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Re-scrape after 69bae76Playwright fix applied: added Endpoint confirmed live: direct request to
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This was referenced Jul 2, 2026
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fife.gov.uk returns HTTP 403 to wreq's Firefox133 TLS fingerprint but serves the councillors page correctly to browser clients. The WAF drops the connection when it detects the non-browser TLS client-hello. This is the same WAF fingerprint block pattern seen on ELN (PR #410), HAL (#400), TON (#402), and others. Adding http_lib = "playwright" switches from wreq to headless Chromium, whose Chrome TLS fingerprint passes the WAF. The scraper has been failing for 10 consecutive days (2026-06-23 through 2026-07-02).
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What broke
Tonbridge and Malling's ModGov endpoint (
democracy.tmbc.gov.uk) times out when accessed from Lambda using wreq's Firefox133 TLS fingerprint. The endpoint is accessible from other IPs and returns valid XML (confirmed 200 OK with 44 councillors), confirming this is a WAF fingerprint block rather than a server outage or IP block.What was fixed
http_lib = "playwright"— switches from wreq (Firefox133 TLS emulation) to headless Chromium, which uses a standard Chrome TLS fingerprint that passes the WAF check. Same fix pattern as HAL, DAC, LBH, NYE, WOX, FOE, MON.Scrape results
Confirmed from live XML endpoint:
Note: email count will be populated once the scraper runs end-to-end via Lambda.
Generated by Claude Code