Website validity and accessibility tests Aust UK and USA sites

James wrote:
[top-posting sort of corrected]

John Hosking wrote:
James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites
for W3C validity and accessibility features.

Accessibility, my butt. Here's what I get to "access" when I click
your links (FF, Opera, IE6):

"Your permission to access Heretic Press has been revoked by the
webmaster.

Your browser may be unidentified or you are downloading too many files
for offline viewing. Someone from your IP address might be trying to
access password protected files?

Contact the manager at hereticpress, if you have been unfairly
excluded from access."

Of course, I *can't* contact the manager at hereticpress, as the Web
site is inaccessible to me.


Contact me by email John, not from my website, it is not hard to guess what the email address is the webmaster at hereticpress.com

I must admit I don't understand this sentence, Tim. (You have an e-mail
address on your NG posts, but I don't see the need to go to e-mail
anyway. I wouldn't have guessed "webmaster@" , though, when told to
"contact the manager".)

I do ban many servers which host spam email collectors or maybe your IP is close to a range that has abused access in the past, sorry but if I do not ban some bad bots my site will be reproduced elsewhere.

"Close" to a range? Sounds like a pretty inexact way to keep the public
from accessing your site.

I could search through server logs for your IP but that is too time consuming, if you send me your IP I could allow access, but then again maybe your "butt" does not inspire me to do that.

My IP at this moment is 85.2.171.101. My ISP, Bluewin, gives me a
(usually) different one every time I log on.

85.2.171.101 is not a brand new number, it's been used. I admit I don't
know who had it last. I don't know where it's been. It seems to work for
my purposes, with your site being the obvious exception. But maybe a
previous user tried to access password-protected files. Presumably, your
password protection prevented them from doing so, so I don't see why I
should suffer.

How can you tell that somebody (using my current IP address, or
something "close" to it) was downloading files for offline viewing? What
constitutes "too many" of them?

My browser can't be unidentified, as I believe Firefox, Internet
Explorer and Opera are all not only identified, but well known. So it
must be one of the other problems your error message mentioned.

I don't mean to sound as confrontational or obnoxious as I probably do
here, and I have to confess that I've spent more time on these two posts
than I probably would at your site (I didn't get the impression that
Harlan was very impressed). But it strikes me as weird as well as
mildly annoying that I would get such a non-useful message as punishment
for having been interested in your content. :-(

--
John

"John Hosking" <john-nin (AT) bluemail (DOT) ch> wrote

James wrote:
[top-posting sort of corrected]

John Hosking wrote:
James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites for
W3C validity and accessibility features.

Accessibility, my butt. Here's what I get to "access" when I click your
links (FF, Opera, IE6):

"Your permission to access Heretic Press has been revoked by the
webmaster.

Your browser may be unidentified or you are downloading too many files
for offline viewing. Someone from your IP address might be trying to
access password protected files?

Contact the manager at hereticpress, if you have been unfairly excluded
from access."

Of course, I *can't* contact the manager at hereticpress, as the Web
site is inaccessible to me.


Contact me by email John, not from my website, it is not hard to guess
what the email address is the webmaster at hereticpress.com

I must admit I don't understand this sentence, Tim. (You have an e-mail
address on your NG posts, but I don't see the need to go to e-mail anyway.
I wouldn't have guessed "webmaster@" , though, when told to "contact the
manager".)


I do ban many servers which host spam email collectors or maybe your IP
is close to a range that has abused access in the past, sorry but if I do
not ban some bad bots my site will be reproduced elsewhere.

"Close" to a range? Sounds like a pretty inexact way to keep the public
from accessing your site.


I could search through server logs for your IP but that is too time
consuming, if you send me your IP I could allow access, but then again
maybe your "butt" does not inspire me to do that.

My IP at this moment is 85.2.171.101. My ISP, Bluewin, gives me a
(usually) different one every time I log on.

85.2.171.101 is not a brand new number, it's been used. I admit I don't
know who had it last. I don't know where it's been. It seems to work for
my purposes, with your site being the obvious exception. But maybe a
previous user tried to access password-protected files. Presumably, your
password protection prevented them from doing so, so I don't see why I
should suffer.

How can you tell that somebody (using my current IP address, or something
"close" to it) was downloading files for offline viewing? What constitutes
"too many" of them?

My browser can't be unidentified, as I believe Firefox, Internet Explorer
and Opera are all not only identified, but well known. So it must be one
of the other problems your error message mentioned.

I don't mean to sound as confrontational or obnoxious as I probably do
here, and I have to confess that I've spent more time on these two posts
than I probably would at your site (I didn't get the impression that
Harlan was very impressed). But it strikes me as weird as well as mildly
annoying that I would get such a non-useful message as punishment for
having been interested in your content. :-(

--
John

Yep... banning dynamically assigned IP addresses is a "VERY BAD IDEA INDEED"

John Hosking wrote:

James wrote:
[top-posting sort of corrected]

John Hosking wrote:

James wrote:

I am continuing tests of Australian, UK and USA government websites
for W3C validity and accessibility features.


Accessibility, my butt. Here's what I get to "access" when I click
your links (FF, Opera, IE6):

"Your permission to access Heretic Press has been revoked by the
webmaster.

Your browser may be unidentified or you are downloading too many
files for offline viewing. Someone from your IP address might be
trying to access password protected files?

Contact the manager at hereticpress, if you have been unfairly
excluded from access."

Of course, I *can't* contact the manager at hereticpress, as the Web
site is inaccessible to me.



Contact me by email John, not from my website, it is not hard to guess
what the email address is the webmaster at hereticpress.com


I must admit I don't understand this sentence, Tim. (You have an e-mail
address on your NG posts, but I don't see the need to go to e-mail
anyway. I wouldn't have guessed "webmaster@" , though, when told to
"contact the manager".)


I do ban many servers which host spam email collectors or maybe your
IP is close to a range that has abused access in the past, sorry but
if I do not ban some bad bots my site will be reproduced elsewhere.


"Close" to a range? Sounds like a pretty inexact way to keep the public
from accessing your site.


I could search through server logs for your IP but that is too time
consuming, if you send me your IP I could allow access, but then again
maybe your "butt" does not inspire me to do that.


My IP at this moment is 85.2.171.101. My ISP, Bluewin, gives me a
(usually) different one every time I log on.

85.2.171.101 is not a brand new number, it's been used. I admit I don't
know who had it last. I don't know where it's been. It seems to work for
my purposes, with your site being the obvious exception. But maybe a
previous user tried to access password-protected files. Presumably, your
password protection prevented them from doing so, so I don't see why I
should suffer.

How can you tell that somebody (using my current IP address, or
something "close" to it) was downloading files for offline viewing? What
constitutes "too many" of them?

My browser can't be unidentified, as I believe Firefox, Internet
Explorer and Opera are all not only identified, but well known. So it
must be one of the other problems your error message mentioned.

I don't mean to sound as confrontational or obnoxious as I probably do
here, and I have to confess that I've spent more time on these two posts
than I probably would at your site (I didn't get the impression that
Harlan was very impressed). But it strikes me as weird as well as
mildly annoying that I would get such a non-useful message as punishment
for having been interested in your content. :-(

Thanks for your patience John, sorry for mildly annoying you. It was not
the IP I banned but another Bluewin customer deny from .cust.bluewin.ch

Please don't take it as meaning to punish anyone, you would be suprised
how many religious web heads try to silence and hack a heretics site, it
is basic security which will be misplaced in about 5% of cases of
dynamically assigned dialup IPs, but the 95% denied access are really
bad bots for example many bots from Beijing China, some from Canada and
some US email address collectors like rima-tide.net. There are some
really malicious people out there, those who create nothing and try to
destroy others work. In stopping many of them I do inadvertantly stop
some good people but not very many, please accept my apologies and try
to access the site again if your patience with me has not worn too thin.

What constitutes too much? How about when you open the server log and
see that a client has downloaded a 100 pages and 120MB in a few minutes,
not a human browsing pages, but a bot taking not just header details but
all the content on every page as fast as it can, if this is not stopped
your whole site can be reproduced elsewhere, especially if it uses
relative directories and not absolute full pathways to URLs which
provides other advantages worth keeping, like quicker loading times and
being able to run the site from a CD.

Harlan did correct me on few out-of-date items which I have updated for
the US education department. I have a few differences of opinion with
him regarding the use of URLs in meta tags and maybe other areas as
well, but his advice was sound and appreciated and I acted on his advice
by updating the review.

The most up-to-date page is the Australian University review page which
has been recently peer reviewed by some academics at Australian
universities, whose opinion I respect, even though some others dislike
me for making the review page, saying I am not being "nice". I care more
about telling the truth than being nice.

http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/...g/AustUni.html

Tim