I got the pertussis vaccine this morning. California is experiencing an epidemic of pertussis, its worst in 55 years, with 4,223 cases as of September 21….and 9 deaths, all infants too young to be vaccinated. The state Department of Public Health is recommending that anyone who expects to spend time around infants get a booster shot. If you can’t get pertussis yourself, then you can’t pass it on to your children (or the kids you’re babysitting, etc.).
Apparently there are websites out there that are redirecting Internet Explorer users to the Alternative Browser Alliance. This is, IMHO, both counter-productive and counter to the open spirit of the web.
For all the same reasons that you shouldn’t block visitors using Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Opera, or anything else unless there’s an actual, genuine technical reason (and unless you’re doing serious multimedia that has no fallback option, there is rarely a genuine technical reason), you shouldn’t be blocking visitors using Internet Explorer…
Because you’re not going to change them. You’re just going to make them angry.
They arrived at your site looking for something. Slapping them in the face and sending them off to another site is not going to get them to change their behavior and come back. It’s just going to make them look somewhere else for someone offering the same thing who won’t make them jump through hoops.
Last week I received a message through the Alternative Browser Alliance’s contact form asking, “What does this have to do with cpanel?” I wanted to reply, “Nothing, why do you ask?”…but the person who asked the question hadn’t left an email address, just the name “King Kong.”
(Tip: If you want an answer to a question, give people a way to contact you!)
So I checked the server logs and saw that he(?) had arrived on the Why Alternative Browsers? page and had left no referrer. Great, another dead end.
I was ready to write it off as spam, but then I decided to search the logs for cpanel, and found several hits referred by a cpanel tutorial. I visited the page and didn’t see any links to my site, but when I looked at the source, I spotted this script:
if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("MSIE")!= -1)
{
window.location = "http://www.alternativebrowseralliance.com/why.html";
}
Wow. They just redirected all IE users with no explanation — not even pointing out that they were being shunted off to another website! Imagine opening the front door of a computer repair shop and walking inside to find a political activist’s office instead!
Presumably “King Kong” had searched for cpanel, followed a link to this tutorial, and found himself looking at a page about alternative web browsers. No wonder he didn’t leave a contact address. He didn’t want an answer. He was angry and blowing off steam — at me, for something that someone else did.
And did badly, I might add: Three of the five visits I could actually identify in the logs claimed to be Opera Mini, not Internet Explorer. I don’t recall whether Opera Mini can masquerade as another browser (the current Android version doesn’t offer the option, but this claimed to be an older Java version), but the desktop version certainly can. Older versions of Opera used to deliberately identify themselves as IE (with a tag adding that, no, actually it’s Opera), and would have been caught by this script!
The User-Agent isn’t a reliable indicator. It was never intended to be. If you must single out Internet Explorer for some reason, use conditional comments. That’s what they’re designed for.
If what you want to do is block IE visitors, though, think about what you’re really accomplishing. And please, don’t just silently shove the “problem” visitors onto someone else.
On Saturday we went the the Mark Taper Forum to see The Glass Menagerie. It seemed an appropriate night for a “little silver slipper of a moon” (next to the Bank of America tower).
It was a great production, and one that really made use of the idea of it being a “memory play.” Most of the productions I’ve seen (including the one I did in high school) tend to switch between past and present as if they were two distinct experiences. This one mixed them together freely.
(Interesting thought: I’ve probably been to the Ahmanson Theater a dozen times or more, and I’ve seen three shows at the Mark Taper Forum…but I’ve never been inside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or the Walt Disney Concert Hall.)
I found a sneaky type of spambot this morning. It was impersonating regular commenters on Speed Force, using their names and (at first glance) email addresses to blend in.
The names weren’t terribly surprising, but the email addresses were. Where had it gotten them? WordPress shouldn’t reveal them, unless there’s a bug somewhere. Was one of my plugins accidentally leaking email addresses? Had someone figured out a way to correlate Gravatar hashes with another database of emails?
As I looked through the comments, I realized that in most cases, it wasn’t the commenter’s usual email address. Here’s what the spambot was doing:
The actual content (if you can call it that) of the comments was just a random string of numbers, and the site was a variation on “hello world,” leading me to suspect that it might be a trial run. Certainly they could have been a lot sneakier: I’ve seen comment spam that extracts text from other comments, or from outbound links, or even from related sites to make it look like an actual relevant comment.
I’d worry about giving them ideas, but I suspect it’s already the next step in the design.
Update: They came back for a second round, this time here at K2R, and I noticed something else: It only uses the first name for the constructed email address, but does so naively, just breaking the name by spaces. This is particularly amusing with names like “Mr. So-and-so,” where it creates an address like mr@example.com, and pingbacks, where the “name” is really the title of a post.
I’ve never understood why people will use a lower-case L in the middle of an otherwise all-caps phrase. It’s the only lower-case letter that happens to look exactly like another letter entirely when mixed with capitals.
Free raffie? for a waik-in tub?