Started to get this message when accessing Reddit. I use LibreWolf as a browser, which does indeed provide a more generic user agent to combat fingerprinting, but nothing out of the ordinary either (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/119.0). Anyone else experiencing this?
Edit: seems to have resolved itself. Thanks for confirming I wasn’t doing anything wrong. Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
Why are you still using that shitty site?
I say this as someone that was there since before the digg migration.
I hate using it, but there are some things I just can’t find info on anywhere else. Reddit is always a last resort, but it frequently turns out to be the only resource.
Yup, sadly I need to use it for certain things. I have asked for my ban to be reversed from some salty mod, but they will not reply. Hello Opera and VPN and I can go comment and not care.
Woah there partner. We noticed we can’t fingerprint you, so we’re not even going to let you in. Please remove your pants, bend over, and try again.
Let’s hope this isn’t some new algorithm to test if for insufficient fingerprinting so Reddit can kick ad-resistant users.
Why hope that? That’s exactly what it is. If anything we should encourage shit like that so the site can crash and burn even more. They deserve nothing. It’s too bad many of the subreddit blackouts only lasted 48 hours, and even worse people gave up and went back to reddit.
Let’s hope they do something really crazy and start requiring ID for all users so more people will get fed up and leave.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/17vbyr8/whoa_there_pardner_error_message/
Text:
Hey all!
It looks like most of you had difficulty reaching the site for about 5 minutes, but those issues should have subsided.
During that time, you may have been shown an incorrect error message that read:
Whoa there, pardner! reddit's awesome and all, but you may have a bit of a problem. Make sure your User-Agent is not empty, is something unique and descriptive and try again. if you're supplying an alternate User-Agent string, try changing back to default as that can sometimes result in a block.
To share some additional context on what happened - we pushed a bad code change in our tooling that resulted in a significant amount of users getting blocked without doing anything wrong. So if you happened to see that error message within the last hour, don’t fret! We’ve reverted the code change that caused this error and things should be back to normal very soon if they aren’t already.
“bad code change” describes pretty much every vide change they’ve done over the past 7ish years lol
But they don’t care at all about bots.
I think what it is is, they were probably hoping the web integrity would work originally that Google was proposing, and were probably planning to take advantage of that. However, I guess since it has not went through yet at Google that they are still using their version of it but just limiting it to empty user agents in the browser?
Other than for that reason that I wouldn’t worry about someone user agent as an owner for reddit. If bots were an issue, wouldn’t I issue a warning for the user to slow down and maybe temporarily block the IP or something like that?
Reddit is corrupt. It probably has something to do with them wanting to track you, and they can’t track you if you have a blank user agent.
Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans instead of data mines. Life is more dignified here at Lemmy.
Stay here at Lemmy where humans are respected as humans
I saw a post a few days ago where one Lemmy user threatened to triangulate another user via IP, and then hurt them, because they said Linux doesn’t work out of the box as well as windows in their experience.
This was on a main instance. The person didn’t get in any trouble.
Yeah, Lemmy is full of shit heads and mods/admins rarely care. You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc. Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.
You can also see plenty of misogyny, non stop verbal abuse, etc.
Lemmy is basically a playground for 13 year olds with development difficulties.
I’m just going to highlight these two sentences, and ask you think really really hard about why this comment has more downvotes than upvotes.
Truth hurts 13yo kids and they do what they can do best - hit dat downside button hard!
I’ve got Hermit setup for /r/CombatFootage and it’s still loading fine.
I’ve got a custom user agent (‘mobile’) and I block everything that I can.
I would strongly discourage changing your user agent to anything no standard. Doing that makes you extremely easy to spot in a data set
they’re trying to limit automated scrap or the like. avoid that domain as much as you can