`download_data()` no longer working

[mthomas-ketchbrook]

Issue

We are experiencing a major issue where FCA has now put up a preventative "Verifying you are a human..." screen before the landing page for the data archive loads.

This is causing download_data() to fail, and causing the build on CRAN to fail.

CRAN has notified us that this needs to be fixed before 2025-01-12. The failing CRAN build logs can be found at https://cran.r-project.org/web/checks/check_results_fcall.html.

Solution

In order to keep the download_data() function working for users of {fcall} (and avoiding needing something like selenium), we are exploring self-hosting all of the FCA Call Report data files published on https://www.fca.gov/bank-oversight/call-report-data-for-download in a public AWS S3 bucket.

download_data() would then need to point to the AWS S3 location.

[mthomas-ketchbrook]

I've published all of the Call Report .zip files (since 2000) in a public S3 bucket at the following URL convention:

https://fca-call-report-data.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/raw/<zip_file>

For example: https://fca-call-report-data.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/raw/2025September.zip.

This should be as easy as updating the URLs here.