# Changelog of DOTmed Medical Equipment Scraper (`subrosa/dotmed-equipment`) Actor

- **URL**: https://apify.com/subrosa/dotmed-equipment/changelog.md
- **Full Actor documentation**: https://apify.com/subrosa/dotmed-equipment.md

## Changelog

All notable changes to this Actor, newest first.

### 2026-09-26

- Initial build. CheerioCrawler over DOTmed.com's public category and
  item pages. Extraction verified against live fixtures captured the
  same day (see `test/fixtures/`).
- Discovered during build that DOTmed's own pagination (`?offset=`) is
  disallowed by robots.txt (`Disallow: /browse/*?*`) — the crawl design
  uses breadth across category/subcategory entry points instead of
  query-string pagination. Documented in README's "Limits and honesty".
- Discovered DOTmed answers bursts of detail-page requests faster than
  \~1 every 3 seconds with HTTP 429; `maxConcurrency` set to 1 and
  `maxRequestsPerMinute` to 20 accordingly.
- `specifications`, `sellerLocation`, `sellerType`, `auctionEndsAt`, and
  `listedAt` shipped as reserved (always-null) fields — the source does
  not expose them reliably enough to fill without guessing.
- First real platform run (through Apify's shared datacenter proxy pool)
  came back with zero items — not a code bug: the crawler got a fast
  HTTP 200 with no embedded product data. A same-input run with the
  proxy off got full data immediately. DOTmed silently omits the
  embedded JSON-LD product data for requests from Apify's shared
  datacenter IP pool while serving it normally to a direct connection
  under the same declared identity. Default `proxyConfiguration`
  changed to no proxy (direct) accordingly — this is a data-availability
  finding, not bot evasion; nothing about the identity or request
  changes, only which network path it goes out on.