Discourse and Pale Moon Browser Issue
A user, Petter1, reported an issue with Discourse forums and the Pale Moon browser, where the browser is classified as a bot due to its user agent string. According to gerhard, the issue started after January 20 and is related to improved bot detection.
The user agent string for Pale Moon is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:3.4) Goanna/20180208 PaleMoon/27.7.2, which is not recognized by Discourse as a valid browser. sam explained that the detection is based on a list of known browser user agent strings, and Pale Moon’s string does not match any of the known browsers.
sam considered adding an exception for Pale Moon, but noted that it would imply support for the Firefox fork, which is not the case. However, after further discussion, sam decided to add an exception for Pale Moon, as it is technically not a bot or crawler. The exception was implemented in a commit to the Discourse repository.
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.
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
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:
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:
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
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 
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.
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