Today I discovered I was able to read my access logs and checked them for some 404 status codes. Because you know, I want to avoid those. Apparently there is a user 62.177.254.98 out there still using Opera 7.54. Seriously, did you miss the update? So in my fight against those ‘errors’ it appears that users love to guess and create an ugly mess:
62.177.254.98 - - [10/May/2005:10:21:17 +0200] "GET /statistics/ HTTP/1.1" 404 295 "-" "Opera/7.54 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]" 62.177.254.98 - - [10/May/2005:10:21:22 +0200] "GET /statistieken/ HTTP/1.1" 404 297 "-" "Opera/7.54 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]" 62.177.254.98 - - [10/May/2005:10:21:26 +0200] "GET /stats HTTP/1.1" 404 289 "-" "Opera/7.54 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]" 62.177.254.98 - - [10/May/2005:10:21:29 +0200] "GET /awstats HTTP/1.1" 404 291 "-" "Opera/7.54 (Windows NT 5.1; U) [en]"
For those who really want to know. I currently have around 6500 visits a day; over 20000 hits and that’s that. If you want to know this kind of information, just ask; don’t guess.
Now to the next point. It seems Firefox has some ugly bug. A lot of Firefox users do this:
62.8.116.227 - - [10/May/2005:11:49:00 +0200] "GET /foo HTTP/1.1" 404 287 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414 Firefox/1.0.3" 62.8.116.227 - - [10/May/2005:11:49:00 +0200] "GET /images/product-thunderbird.png HTTP/1.1" 404 314 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.7.7) Gecko/20050414
Kind of annoying, don’t you think? I believe it has to do with my post on markup content models which references both locations; except for the fact that they are encoded, inside PRE elements. How broken is Firefox’ Atom feed reader?
You would be surprised how many people use 7.2x still. There is a subset of users for whom any sort of an upgrade is worse than torture, it is the anticipated torture with all anxiety that entails. And I do not mean only Opera here. It's a universal phenomenon. These people stick to whatever they first installed, or whatever someone installed for them. It might seem amusing to many, but to these people, the anxiety is real. I have seen this behavior with my very own eyes.
Ah, what fun to post comments in the middle of your site upgrade. All sorts of things fly into the screen :]
I have used Opera 7.2x some times while i was wisiting your site, though this is when I am at those lame school computers ;)
Your school lets you use Opera!? Winner! :o)
At first I thought it might have been me, but that would have been Opera 7.50, my IP is different and I'm not typing in /statistics in the IRI. ;)
Moose, newer is not in any way equal to better, let me just refer to the print settings which have arrived sometime during the Opera 8 betas... (true, they can be customized, but they're just an example) Besides, examaning the menus for new options and then porting over your own customizations or the other way around can take some time.
Firefox's feed reader (Live Bookmarks) doesn't deal with description of the feed entries. Probably bugs of some extensions (you know, there are lots).
By the way, did you enable the CheckSpelling directive? - When I once enabled it, it significantly reduced the amount of errors. It saves the logs and improves the user experience.
Well, okay, you got me. What was I thinking? Creating such an ugly mess for you :) Sorry man.
Some hosts have some sort of public statistics for their clients (Exsilia for example). Of course arguable if they should be accessible to just everyone, but heck, I was just curious if de internetman (IIRC) did the same. Apparently not (or perhaps I should continue guessing!). Anyway, not necessarily interested in the numbers, more in the feature.
And I agree with Frenzie. I'm used to (and happy enough with) my current settings (thank you Moose!). I'll update when I've got some time. For now I only have time to guess and mess around in my (heavily outdated) address bar :)
Those statistics used to be public anyway; a year or so back I accidentally found that directory when doing a Search Engine query. I vaguely remember it was using something similar to Webalizer, I suspect now things have changed.
Well, it's not nearly as odd as some of the words for directories I have noted people trying to find in my sites.
I guess the weird requests from Firefox has to do with Sages "Allow HTML tags" option.
Hmm, didn't you access those stats without passwords when I was spying in Limpid HQ?
Some people refuse to upgrade because of a tiny change in their favorite feature. Thereby ignoring all the other improvements. (Those are also the people who vote agains the European Constitution.)
It might an atempt to hack your server. As you can see the user is looking for the awstats folder. The Awstats had an security flaw this year and hacker could use that to hack your server. There was a few bloggs out there that got hacked because of it. It might not be that someone is looking for your stats, he just want to hack your site ;)
It is more than likely a crawler since one obvious clue tends to be: robots.txt.
It's surprising how many people don't protect the more sensitive site directories that they supposedly try hide from robots, which they'd also probably prefer to have hidden from people.
Robert, it is not. I verified that ip in my comment database. Also, I just didn’t plan to make that directory public. Linking to it like that is not really a problem. However, I’m thinking of making it completely private as it isn’t relevant.
Yes, I mean it's the same case with mozilla.org it's one of those things many people overlook and obviously a malicious entity would be interested in such directories.
I think is just "best-practice" to keep the more susceptible data hidden using a variety of methods.
See, I paid for Opera and would love to update from 7.54 to 8.0. The problem is, there is no final version of Opera 8 available for Mac. And I do not like beta versions.
Additionally, the latest localized version of Opera for German is 6.03! Not even 7.x. English is no problem for me, but most users over here in Germany do not understand English well enough and need a translated browser interface.
Lars, I am quite sure that Opera in German is there available for recent versions?
Sjoerd, happy to be one of them (although I can't remember not upgrading, but I will vote against the European Constitution - listening to those who support it is enough to convince me to vote against it). And my customized layout of Opera 7.5 was pretty much a copy of 7.2 with 7.5's new features included (and the customizations I had already done in the past). If you can't (easily) do that to an application, I can very well understand people who don't like to upgrade. Besides, it could always break something...
Frenzie, I was talking about the Mac version of Opera. Select platform “Mac OS” on the Opera site and cry …
On my Windows-PC there is Opera 8 installed in German, of course.