Mysterious referrer log URLs
February 4, 2004 7:11 PM Subscribe
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?"
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?"
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
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
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posted by zsazsa at 7:43 PM on February 4, 2004