Fix NBL (Northumberland) scraper - #490
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What broke
northumberland.moderngov.co.uknow has Cloudflare Bot Management in front of it. When wreq (the Haskell HTTP client) requestshttp://northumberland.moderngov.co.uk/mgWebService.asmx/GetCouncillorsByWard, Cloudflare returns 403 Forbidden rather than the XML data. The same block applies on HTTPS, and the council has been failing for 4 consecutive runs (since 2026-07-31).What was fixed
base_urlinmetadata.jsonfromhttp://tohttps://— Cloudflare enforces HTTPS on this domainhttp_lib = "playwright"tocouncillors.py— headless Chromium solves the Cloudflare JS challenge and fetches the ASMX XML endpoint. This is the same pattern used in PR Fix BPC (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole) scraper #407 (BPC) for Cloudflare-protected ModernGov instances and in PRs Fix BNS (Barnsley) scraper #472–Fix MSU (Mid Suffolk) scraper #488 for other councils with the same failure mode.Scrape results
Local verification was not possible in this run — the network proxy used in this environment blocks Chromium's TLS connections, causing connection resets when playwright tries to navigate to
*.moderngov.co.uk. The fix is structurally identical to the fix applied in PR #407 (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole) which was merged and verified in Lambda. Scrape counts will be confirmed once CI runs in Lambda.Generated by Claude Code