Mysterious referrer log URLs

February 4, 2004 7:11 PM

I'm getting a lot of weird URLs in my site's referrer logs that look like this: wysiwyg://5/http://www.mydomain.com/somepage.php. Anybody know what the heck's going on? [more inside]

I've done some Googing and I turned up this page which describes that weird protocol a bit, but I still don't understand why I'm getting a hundred hits like this a day. They all point to the same page on my site but the requests are just for images, not the actual content. Here's an excerpt from the logs:

165.155.128.132 - - [03/Feb/2004:08:59:54 -0500] "GET /img/cornernav_r-tr.gif HTTP/1.0" 304 - "wysiwyg://5/http://www.mysite.com/somepage.php" "Mozilla/4.08 (Macintosh; I; PPC, Nav)"

They all seem to come from the same IP address blog, and they're all reporting Mozilla on Mac PPC. I do get a lot of school age visitors to this particular site, so maybe it's just some quirk of the old setup they're using. On the other hand, the little paranoid webmaster inside my head keeps wondering, "Has some no-good, nefarious person found a new way to direct link my images?"

posted by web-goddess to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Sounds like a bunch of people running Netscape are printing stuff out on your page. I'm not sure if Mozilla still does the 'wysiwyg://' thing any more...
posted by zsazsa at 7:43 PM on February 4, 2004

Camino on the mac does that.
posted by machaus at 8:13 PM on February 4, 2004

Mozilla/4.08 (Macintosh; I; PPC, Nav)

WOW. That thing's like an antique...

Anyway, my guess is that someone saved your page locally (as a template for their own work, maybe?). I can't speak to how that version of Netscape does it, but a lot of browsers will only save the HTML itself, and make requests for the images from the server when you open the file locally.
posted by mkultra at 6:47 AM on February 5, 2004