What is wrong with the following UA: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
thetrasher
5:30 pm on Nov 17, 2012 (gmt 0)
It's an Internet Explorer 6 running on Windows XP without any service pack or with SP1. What's wrong with old software?
lucy24
11:29 pm on Nov 17, 2012 (gmt 0)
Can it be human? I've got one source of human MSIE UAs spanning about a year. Most go on for miles; the short versions are
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) and far less often Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; GTB7.3) Caveat: Most of them are probably the same physical machine, so I don't know how representative this is.
One non-human that sneaked into the same list: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
Samizdata
3:22 am on Nov 18, 2012 (gmt 0)
Can it be human?
Absolutely - humans can use any user-agent they want.
It could be someone using Safari on OSX, for example.
I'd guess it was probably a bot and might look for other signals.
Alternatively, I might restrict it to an "obsolete browser not supported" page.
What's wrong with old software?
Some of it is a security risk, some of it is so outdated that it is effectively useless.
But if you said "some old software is still useful, risk-free, fast and efficient" I would agree.
Unless you were talking about IE6, of course.
...
dupres01
8:25 am on Nov 18, 2012 (gmt 0)
It didn't act human. it did a GET on my index but didn't pick up any of the associated files.
lucy24
2:48 pm on Nov 18, 2012 (gmt 0)
Sounds like a robot to me. ymmv but I generally don't pay much attention to robots that just drift by and pick up the index page. I'm not a front-driven site* so they won't find anything interesting or useful.
* For several years I didn't even have a front page. That is, there was a page called index.html, but it had about two lines of text, no pictures and no links.
