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Oh dear - bitten by his "scraping" protection. As his site no longer allows me to view with Firefox-115 ESR, it being deemed as "too old" despite still being a

Oh dear - bitten by his "scraping" protection. As his site no longer allows me to view with Firefox-115 ESR, it being deemed as "too old" despite still being a supported release.

beej71 2y ago
I hit reload on FF and it worked...? I don't know why I got flagged once and not subsequent times.
thatcks 2y ago
There was a little glitch in the scraping protection where an errant regular expression briefly blocked all Firefox versions. Which is especially bad because I (the blog author) exclusively use Firefox, so I was blocking myself. The management apologizes for the problem (and generally allows much older Firefox versions than Chrome versions, as people seem to still use them on various platforms).
- dfawcus 2y ago
  Hmm - it still blocks me when my browser reports its native string of: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0 however if I override it to the following, the site lets be through: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0
  - thatcks 2y ago
    This should be fixed for you now. To my surprise, some legitimate versions of Firefox report 'rv:109.0' with a Firefox/<ver> version that is not 109 (along with all of the crawlers that have latched on to 'rv:109.0' as something they put in their User-Agent strings along with random old Firefox versions).
    - philkrylov 2y ago
      Hi, I am still blocked with "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0"
    - dfawcus 2y ago
      It looks like those versions will continue for some time, at least until Sep 2025 on Win 7-8.1 and macOS 10.12-10.14, given the recent announcement: https://www.ghacks.net/2025/02/19/mozilla-extends-firefox-support-for-windows-7-to-september-2025/ and I can confirm that I can now read your site using the native user agent string. (FWIW, I expect to upgrade to FF-128 within the next couple of months.)
nayuki 2y ago
Actual text: > You're using a suspiciously old browser > You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace, the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions of Chrome). Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that use a variety of old browser user agents, especially Chrome user agents. To reduce the load on Wandering Thoughts I'm experimenting with (attempting to) block all of them, and you've run into this. > If this is in error and you're using a current version of your browser of choice, you can contact me at my current place at the university (you should be able to work out the email address from that). If possible, please let me know what browser you're using and so on, ideally with its exactl User-Agent string. Chris Siebenmann, 2025-02-17

Oh dear - bitten by his "scraping" protection. As his site no longer allows me to view with Firefox-115 ESR, it being deemed as "too old" despite still being a supported release.

beej71 2y ago

I hit reload on FF and it worked...? I don't know why I got flagged once and not subsequent times.

thatcks 2y ago

There was a little glitch in the scraping protection where an errant regular expression briefly blocked all Firefox versions. Which is especially bad because I (the blog author) exclusively use Firefox, so I was blocking myself. The management apologizes for the problem (and generally allows much older Firefox versions than Chrome versions, as people seem to still use them on various platforms).

dfawcus 2y ago
Hmm - it still blocks me when my browser reports its native string of: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0 however if I override it to the following, the site lets be through: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:128.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/128.0
- thatcks 2y ago
  This should be fixed for you now. To my surprise, some legitimate versions of Firefox report 'rv:109.0' with a Firefox/<ver> version that is not 109 (along with all of the crawlers that have latched on to 'rv:109.0' as something they put in their User-Agent strings along with random old Firefox versions).
  - philkrylov 2y ago
    Hi, I am still blocked with "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/115.0"
  - dfawcus 2y ago
    It looks like those versions will continue for some time, at least until Sep 2025 on Win 7-8.1 and macOS 10.12-10.14, given the recent announcement: https://www.ghacks.net/2025/02/19/mozilla-extends-firefox-support-for-windows-7-to-september-2025/ and I can confirm that I can now read your site using the native user agent string. (FWIW, I expect to upgrade to FF-128 within the next couple of months.)

nayuki 2y ago

Actual text: > You're using a suspiciously old browser > You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace, the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions of Chrome). Unfortunately, as of early 2025 there's a plague of high volume crawlers (apparently in part to gather data for LLM training) that use a variety of old browser user agents, especially Chrome user agents. To reduce the load on Wandering Thoughts I'm experimenting with (attempting to) block all of them, and you've run into this. > If this is in error and you're using a current version of your browser of choice, you can contact me at my current place at the university (you should be able to work out the email address from that). If possible, please let me know what browser you're using and so on, ideally with its exactl User-Agent string. Chris Siebenmann, 2025-02-17