#UserAgent based banning of #textmode browsers is sooooo lame.

$ lynx -useragent=🖕 https://[…]

#Lynx #TUI #Browser #TextModeBrowser #Unicode #UTF8 #Emoji

@xtaran I'm gonna need an example of a website that does it. Because I've never encountered it and I use links2 daily.

#links2gang

ap.org is one. I think they're blocking the 'libwww' part of the Lynx user agent because they believe that it stops bots https://github.com/hcdesigns/nginx-block-bots/blob/master/block.conf

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nginx-block-bots/block.conf at master · hcdesigns/nginx-block-bots

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@w @xtaran

You probably want to be using a fake user-agent anyway. Maybe not a :fuck you: emoji though. afaik it's nowadays just used for tracking and telling you "pls download chrome".

Sometimes I fly the links2 banner proudly, but there's no real benefit apart from standing out.

None of the big name websites care about rendering/redirecting you to a text-browser-friendly page anyway, and most of the smolnet people write websites that are perfectly readable in everything.

any time I find a site that blocks the default user agent, I just change it to something like, "this is totally firefox, you guys" and I get right in

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@w @prahou: Confirmed:

$ lynx -useragent="Lynx/2.9.0dev.12 libxxx-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/3.7.8" www.ap.org

works.

@prahou @xtaran

I regularly hit CloudFlare-fronted services that refuse to return (even static) pages because I'm browsing from lynx(1). Really irksome. And yes, changing the UA-string to something Chrome-ish/Firefoxish merrily bypasses the braindead check.

(curse words) g.f.d. CloudFlare.

There are SO MANY OTHER CDNs! I wish people/orgs would stop using the terrible ones.

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@teajaygrey
amusingly, my brain first tried to parse your curse-word abbreviation as a Usenet group hierarchy 🤦
Haha, get thee to alt.sysadmin.recovery stat! ;)
@teajaygrey @gumnos @xtaran some of my favorite #links2gang experiences
@prahou @teajaygrey @gumnos @xtaran Huh, I'm glad I never got that duckduckgo captcha.

@lanodan I may have been somewhat instrumental in getting them to remove it, because after I had that happen to me several times, I got a bit angry. And then one day it stopped happening.

@xtaran @gumnos @teajaygrey

@prahou
Now if only ClownFlare could be convinced that lynx is a perfectly cromulent browser… ☹

@lanodan @xtaran @teajaygrey

@gumnos @prahou: Indeed, the site where I initially stumbled upon it today is "protected" by Cloudflare.
@xtaran but how will you serve them adverts... and all the other crap websites do now.