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[–]h45erahje5r 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

It's mostly a convention, GET is for read-only requests for data, and POST is for things that change data. But this isn't really enforced by anything.

Search engines only want to make GET requests, because they don't want to modify data.

There's an infamous story where some solo programmer made a wiki where all the Delete links were GET requests. It worked fine for him, because he knew not to click it. But when BigSearchEngine started scraping his website, it also made GET requests for his Delete links, and deleted his whole wiki!

I think the story ends with him having backups, or BigSearch giving him the data they scraped, but I'm not actually sure of that lol