75058 - Compuserve does not allow the mozilla user-agent string

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

(Tech Evangelism Graveyard :: English US, defect)

Description

[Stephen P. Morse]

This is an offshoot of bug 73964.  See that bug for more details.

Basically there were several problems preventing us from doing a successful 
login to compuserve.  One was a cookie problem which I've already fixed (bug 
74112), one is a stream converter problem which still needs to be solved but for 
which I have a work-around in my local tree, and the third is the fact that 
compuserve is rejecting the login because of the mozilla user-agent string.

I proved that the user-agent string was at fault by modifying my build to send 
out a netscape 4.x user-agent string (coding for this described in bug 73964).  
With that masquerade, and with the stream converter work-around, I was 
successfully able to log in to compuserve.

So this bug addresses the evangelism issue to get compuserve (an AOL property!) 
to accept the mozilla user-agent.

Comment 1

[Blake Ross]

-> bc

Comment 2

[Stephen P. Morse]

I was mistaken above when I said that there was an evangelism issue with 
compuserve.  I just ran some more tests trying a compuserve login (bug 73964), 
both with the real mozilla user-agent string and with the masqueraded 4.x 
string.  I observed that in each case sometimes it worked and sometimes it 
didn't.

I now realize that the success or failure is caused by the fact that I sometimes 
simplified my testing by going directly to www.compuserve.com/computing rather 
than going to www.compuserve.com and then clicking on the link for computing.  
In the latter case you are missing some cookies at the point at which you log in 
and that is why you get to the page saying "This area can not be accessed by 
your account".

I must have changed my method of testing when I switched the user-agent string 
which caused me to erroneously concluded that it was an evengelism issue.  So 
I'm closing out this report as invalid.

Comment 3

[Zach Lipton [:zach]]

verif. though it should work...

Comment 4

[Bob Clary [:bc] (inactive)]

All Evangelism Bugs are now in the Product Tech Evangelism. See bug 86997 for
details.