MFGG and antique operating systems

[VinnyVideo]

Earlier this month, there were some days when over 12% of MFGG mainsite sessions had user agents indicating that they run Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT 4.0. Those are some seriously old operating systems.

Do lots of MFGGers regularly use old operating systems to browse the mainsite or forums? I have a suspicion that some of these users might really be bots, since some of these user agents claimed to be running Internet Explorer 9 in Windows 95, which I believe is impossible. (If someone has a weird trick for running IE 9 in Windows 95/98, I'd love to hear about it!)

As much as I enjoy messing with old hardware, 90's operating systems and old browsers have some security issues if you're planning to connect them to a network, especially the Internet. If you're playing games on them, it's probably better to keep old machines offline and manually copy your game files to them.

[Vert]

It's not that hard to fake your UA, is it? At least I hope so because this would be very depressing news otherwise.

I make games with my friend DJ Coco sometimes. Check them out here: https://cliax-games.com/
Or check out my blog: https://vertette.github.io/

[Grey Goo]

It's not that hard to fake your UA, is it? At least I hope so because this would be very depressing news otherwise.

Makes me wonder whats UA for PLATO Computer System...

[VinnyVideo]

@Vert Yeah, it's quite easy to spoof a user agent. Legitimate bots are transparent in what they do, so bots that use fake user agents are usually the shadier ones (the kind that don't like to respect robots.txt).

Course clear! You got a card.

[littlelum]

12% seems really high for those OS. Those OS are older than I am, so it doesn't really make sense that such a sizable chunk regularly use those.

I'm a forum guy living in a Discord world

[VinnyVideo]

@littlelum Indeed. I bet the percentage of actual human users browsing MFGG on a 90's OS is closer to 0.1% or 0.2%.

It should be noted that because of recent mainsite upgrades, the mainsite navbar looks kind of funky if you're on Internet Explorer 9 or older. We decided that it's more important to offer a good experience for modern mobile devices than to ensure a bug-free experience on PCs from 25-30 years ago. Though if anyone wants to test a few CSS rules that make MFGG's mainsite look great on ancient browsers, be my guest.

Course clear! You got a card.