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    Why use POST at all if you are not going to provide data in the body? Commented Mar 4, 2009 at 18:52
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    Because the operation is not idempotent. Commented Mar 4, 2009 at 20:04
  • 27
    @Jared, notice that the word "REST" doesn't appear in this question from 2.5 years ago. :) The HTTP spec about idempotence applies regardless of what the flavor-of-the-month architecture is for web services. Luckily, the system that this API was designed to proxy for has been rendered obsolete anyway. Commented Sep 17, 2011 at 2:48
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    Because server logs don't record POST parameters, but they record query strings. It's much easier to run the series of requests without instrumenting it in the browser, and then look at the traceback, than it is to click through them. Also the API was not browser-to-server, but rather server-to-server. Most importantly, the whole affair was canned anyway. :) Commented Jul 15, 2013 at 13:16
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    For anyone else who doesn't know what idempotent means :| restapitutorial.com/lessons/idempotency.html Commented Dec 1, 2015 at 3:34