@WWWWolf said:
Some extremely WTFful points I posted to Slashdot about this thing:
One of the sites run by this guy (or sponsored or hosted or whatever) is jacklewis.net. (Incidentally, Firefox's history feature stinks (can't wait til Fx3.0 is released, you know =), and the site now gives me Bandwidth Limit Exceeded, and I'm too lazy to look at my Slashdot comment history now, so I can't verify this.)
I installed the Firefox User Agent Switcher extension (anything like of which I have never needed or wanted, thankyouverymuch). The site still failed to show up. I was guessing the site must have done some Extremely Clever Heuristics to figure out that I was using Firefox and just disguising my UA - so I went out to figure out what the heck was going on.
Nope, it was not clever.
Basically, that site did the following kind of JavaScript trick
:if(!document.all) { window.location="that damn site" }
So let me get this straight: Everyone in Slashdot seemed to be so incredibly confident about this - "ha, let's see if it's match for my User Agent Switcher". Nope, User Agent Switcher doesn't work as intended in this case. Why? "When faced with True Idiocy, even the Almighty God is powerless."
Good luck to all browsers that don't implement MSIE 4.0's broken DOM. Go on, Microsoft, please kill document.all, no one in their right mind uses that anymore now that everyone has document.getElementById(), so it can be safely broken. =)
There was absolutely no other tricks to try to identify the browser or whether or not Adblock (or other ad-blocking systems) were installed. That disappoints me - that really disappoints me. I mean, it would have been an educational sight, to see what weird web-related shenanigans had been implemented. Now? The site barely manages to say "Ye doth not speaketh brokeyn Olde Englysh. Get thee to the nunnery, spawne of Satan." to every modern browser out there regardless of what they're fitted with, probably new versions of IE as well. This is so very boring.
I viewed that site in firefox and even thought about posting a message on his blog saying I had done so. However several other people had already done that, and I didn't feel the need to be redundant. All you have to do is disable meta redirects and it can't do a thing about it.
A bit of advise for all the web developers out there who are thinking about doing something like this. You can't. Whatever you publish on the web, you lose control over. You can advise the user's browser to do certain things, sure. But at the end of the day they have control over how they render the page. They can display it with or without ads if they want to, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. They keep you from opening new windows, and again, you can't do anything about it. And they can even tell their browser to disobey your commands, there still isn't anything you can do to stop them.