Comments on: User-Agent Headers: Crazy? Or Craziest?

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:06:50 +0000

@jtresidder: LOL! (And thanks! Most people can’t even be bothered to spell it right, I usually get some permutation of eyelidness…)

By: jtresidder

jtresidder — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:45:26 +0000

@PeterCowburn: I did that for a while, but got fed up of being told that a site couldn’t decide which browser I was using and deciding that an error message would be an acceptable default. I then used a Googlebot’s UA for a while, to see what kind of black/grey hattage was going on on my regular sites… but kept running into “you claim to be a googlebot, but we can tell you aren’t etc.,”. All in all, it’s less grief to just leave it alone :(

By: jtresidder

jtresidder — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:41:57 +0000

@MaratDenenberg, @eyelidlessness (great name, btw):

That’s OK, I’d be two or more people depending on whether I was browsing, developing or reading pages saved for later – that’ll make up for you and your roommate :)

By: PeterCowburn

PeterCowburn — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 03:12:10 +0000

DeWitt Clinton's blog post didn't get a link in the article so here it is. Also, from now on my UA is

HokeyCokey/1.0 (You put your left leg in, your left leg out, in, out, in, out, shake it all about. You do the hokey cokey and you turn around. That's what it's all about...)

By: Nosredna

Nosredna — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:56:56 +0000

Wow. Those bsalsa guys get around.

By: eyelidlessness

eyelidlessness — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:07:36 +0000

@MaratDenenberg: So would my roommate and I, who both use Safari, be the same visitor as far as you’re concerned?

By: d4rk

d4rk — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 00:52:01 +0000

pah, the best I can do:

Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; Embedded Web Browser from: http://bsalsa.com/; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)

By: thepatrick

thepatrick — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 23:17:31 +0000

Mine is: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6; en-gb) AppleWebKit/528.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.4.1 DoesLettingYouSeeThisViolateTheNDA/1.0

Must do a quick trawl through the work logs… some of them are a bit nuts.

By: pplante

pplante — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:24:14 +0000

Longest one from my stats system:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) ; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) (CZee EmbeddedWB); User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) (EmbeddedWB 14.52 from: http://www.bsalsa.com/); .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648)

472 characters long, enhanced with 4x MSIE 6.0 surfing power!

By: broofa

broofa — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:33:31 +0000

Longest one from my logs:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; http://bsalsa.com) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; InfoPath.2)

By: chryss

chryss — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:37:53 +0000

The longest from my most recent logs:

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 3.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.2; NET_mmhpset)

(Yes, all that. Not sure if that’s supposed to be IE 7 or IE 6. It was ostensibly a human being, with a referrer I get many of my hits from, and visiting a few pages.)

By: ddjohnson

ddjohnson — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 18:06:07 +0000

A coworker mentioned on friday that the string “Bryan Peters is hot” was showing up as a user agent string in our logs.

A cursory google search revealed nothing about who this dashing hacker may be ;-)

By: MorganRoderick

MorganRoderick — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:16:30 +0000

This one visits our site from time to time, generating 404’s by requesting “/text/javascript”:

SonyEricssonK800i/R1ED Browser/NetFront/3.3 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 (Mediobot/1.0 +http://bot.medio.com)

If it wasn’t for the fact that their developers has so poor understanding of the medium, I would probably write to them, and point the error of their ways.

I might however, decide to publish the complete works of Shakespeare on that URL, for that user-agent, just to spam their indexes.

By: MaratDenenberg

MaratDenenberg — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:02:02 +0000

Unique user-agent headers are useful in tracking visitors. IP address plus user-agent is all you need.

By: ialexi

ialexi — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 15:41:03 +0000

You managed to convince me to change mine:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1; with super power plasma guns; (compatible; Black Pearl 6.2; Flying Dutchman 3.6; Millennium Falcon 1.5; Energizer Bread Batter 5.2; Random Tandem March of Death 2.79.13 Linux Version; .NET Crap Language Revision 5.2.7)

Not that creative, but the best I could come up with on short notice.