Discourse and Pale Moon browser

Hey Team!

I have a slight issue with Discourse forums and Pale Moon browser (any OS, all versions).
Please look at attachment.

This issue started happening after january 20 somewhere, and seems a js issue as I get
Powered by Discourse, best viewed with JavaScript enabled. - Yes I have js enabled.

I could not post on your issue tracker on github as it’s disabled, so here you go.

Best regards
Peter

Hi Peter,

We never intended to use GitHub Issues to track bugs or other, the right place to report is here on meta.discourse.org.

4 Likes

Hi Peter,

it looks like Discourse classifies your browser as a bot. Bot detection has been improved at the beginning of January: Smarter handling of random crawler traffic

Did you override the user agent in your browser? What’s the user agent shown at http://www.whatsmyua.info/ when you visit it with your Pale Moon browser?

Gerhard

8 Likes

Hi Gerhard,

Ah I see. Thank you for explaining it to me. Will you whitelist Pale Moon in the future?

user agent show:

## According to [useragent](https://github.com/3rd-Eden/useragent) v2.1.9:
- rawUa: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:3.4) Goanna/20180208 PaleMoon/27.7.2
- family: Pale Moon (Firefox Variant)

Best regards

Petter

···

From: “Gerhard Schlager” meta@discoursemail.com
To: biopsin@getmail.no
Sent: Wednesday, February 14, 2018 1:52:06 PM
Subject: [Discourse Meta] [PM] Discourse and Pale Moon browser

gerhard Gerhard Schlager team
February 14
Hi Peter,

it looks like Discourse classifies your browser as a bot. Bot detection has been improved at the beginning of January: Smarter handling of random crawler traffic

Did you override the user agent in your browser? What’s the user agent shown at http://www.whatsmyua.info/ when you visit it with your Pale Moon browser?

Gerhard

This is how we detect if something is not a crawler:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/config/site_settings.yml#L972

Since I can not see “Goanna or Palemoon” in here: trident|webkit|gecko|chrome|safari|msie|opera you are not being detected as a real browser.

Traditionally all browsers ship the pedegree with the user agent string:

5 Likes

After reading Goanna (software) - Wikipedia I guess I am ok to add goanna to our magic string.

Trouble though is it sends a message that we support this Firefox fork, which we do not

1 Like

Hi Sam,

Thank you for your reply.

I did not know it was a UA issue until Gerhard pointed it out, if it´s troublesome I can always do a override.

Since I´m not a Pale Moon developer, only a daily Discourse user using my fav browser, I can only however hope to read one day

Discourse supports this Firefox fork :slight_smile:

Have a nice day.

Petter

Opera, at least the old one with the Presto engine, isn’t officially supported either. Yet it’s on the list.

3 Likes

I guess it is technically correct this is not a bot or crawler, so we can add an exception here.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/7af9ed66746536a51ee91da230514fab2be98293

6 Likes