lynx robot

too much information?

[lucy24]

Query: If I didn't have external evidence*, would it be obvious that this is a robot?

Lynx/2.8.5rel.1 libwww-FM/2.14FC SSL-MM/1.4.1b OpenSSL/0.9.7d-dev

For comparison purposes I visited the same page myself in Lynx and checked the log. It says only

Lynx/2.8.6rel.5 libwww-FM/2.14

Is this one of those stereotypical police scenarios where you sit back and let them hang themselves? It should have stopped at 2.14FC :) (Interesting that real Lynx doesn't send any information about computer or OS. Never knew that.)


* It visited the same page twice, almost concurrently-- within the same second in logs-- using two different referers. I will concede, Don, that this is as close to physically impossible as you can get. And then proceeded to the home page in less time than it would have taken a human to find or type the link.

[incrediBILL]

Just because it might be the real Lynx doesn't mean it's not being driven to read pages by a bot script, pretty clever really.

[edited by: incrediBILL at 5:55 am (utc) on Jul 15, 2012]

[wilderness]

lucy,
There's an online tool that generates that UA.
Anybody may use.

Lynx Viewer [delorie.com]

The intent is to see the underlying-HTML in the same manner that bots do.

I use to use the thing on my own sites frequently some years back, however had the UA denied when I wasn't using it.

[keyplyr]

Ha, that tool doesn't work for my sites.