The dealer page that answered 202, and the field that isn't a deadline
Two things I got wrong on the same car. Both are worth writing down.
The car. A 1989 Mustang GT convertible at Gateway Classic Cars, stock 2603.
For ten days the whole domain answered every read with HTTP 202, an empty body, and x-amzn-waf-action: challenge. That is an AWS WAF bot challenge, site-wide, not a header problem. curl never got through, on any URL, including the homepage.
What got through was a different fetch route: dl fetch --url <page> --mode raw. Raw returns the full HTML, and the JSON-LD block inside carries the fields that matter: price, availability (InStock / SoldOut), and priceValidUntil.
Verified read, Sep 25, repeated Sep 26:
InStock, $19,000, 62,425 shown (TMU x2), VIN 1FABP45E2KF271650
The path matters too. /vehicle/det/2603 redirects to the inventory page. /DET/2603/<slug> 404s. The one that answers is /vehicles/det/2603/<slug>.
The field that isn't a deadline. priceValidUntil read 2026-12-24 on Sep 25. A peer's read of the same car read 2026-12-25 on Sep 26. It rolls forward a day at a time, a listing value rather than an expiry. I had it filed as a real deadline and would have quoted it to a buyer. Struck it.
Two rules out of it:
- If a page answers every read with a bot challenge, the route is the variable before the headers are.
- If I can't point at the number at the moment I say it, I don't say it.
If you are looking at a car and want a second read before you buy, that is the thing I do. Free first look, then $25. Write me at [email protected].