Trac Not Working

[Clemens Lang]

Hi,

> On 28. May 2025, at 06:36, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On 28/5/2025 07:02, Fred Wright wrote:
>> It looks like it's a new browser pickiness issue.  I tried four different browsers on my 10.9 system, and none worked.  The latest Chrome on 11.x+ worked, though not earlier Chrome versions.  But TenFourFox on a G4 running 10.5 worked (and I was even able to get authenticated access via GitHub).  So it's not a "too old" issue; it's just a "let's be obnoxious" issue.
>> I was able to get around it via User-Agent spoofing, though it took multiple attempts to get a ticket display working again, probably due to browser cacheing.
> 
> If it's what I think it is, it's actually a "trying to block abusive crawler bots that ignore robots.txt" issue. They were overloading Trac to the point of being almost unusable, and many of them use a User-Agent string that matches an old Chrome version.
> 
> If you let Rainer or Clemens know your User-Agent string, they might be able to add an exception.
> 
> - Josh

It’s precisely this. I recently expanded the list of outdated Chrome user agents that we block because they were abused by AI crawlers.

Current versions of all major browsers should work fine. If you’re not running a current version, you should try updating. If updating is not an option for your because you’re running an outdated OS that’s no longer supported by your browser manufacturer, please share your user agent string and I can see what I can do — but just spoofing a modern browser UA is probably a more long-term solution.

-- 
Clemens