IE11 Treated as a Bot

[KosherJava]

As discussed at http://www.webtrees.net/index.php/en/forum/2-open-discussion/28438-compatibility-compatibilite-internet-explorer-11 the new user agent string for IE11 (when not in compatibility mode) is in the format of

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko

The current browser user agent parsing in webtrees seemingly classifies this as an unknown bot. The issue is user correctable by adding a rule in the Site access rules screen screen, but it is not intuitive enough for most users. It should be added by default.

Also note (really new bugs, but they are related)
1. The checkboxes do not have the cursor change when you hover over it, so it is not apperant how the screen works.
2. The column header for the checkboxes does appear as a clickable link, but nothing happens
3. there seems no way to truncate the list and performance on the screen is very slow.

To manually configure webtrees to allow it to work with IE11 do the following:

Administration -> Site access rules screen.
filter the "The following visitors were not recognised, and were assumed to be search engines." section by "rv:11.0" (no quotes). when you see the entry for it, check the green checkbox in the allow column. This will add it to the white-listed section on top. One you see it on top, make the following edits to it
Start IP Address: 0.0.0.0
End IP Address: 255.255.255.255
User-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows % Trident/%; rv:%) like Gecko
Comment: New Trident Based Browsers

[fisharebest (fisharebest)]

See also https://github.com/fisharebest/webtrees/issues/32

[Frank Warius (frank-warius)]

an other problem is, that even login.php is spider sensitive and you can't log in as administrator with an unkown browser to change the the site access rules. (I know one webtrees user, who is blind and his equiment is MS based, so it is not an easy way for him to install an other browser like Firefox to fix the access rules)

So maybe it might be usefull to change the bot check for the login und administrator pages - but I don't know if there are other security issues

regards
Frank

[fisharebest (fisharebest)]

@Frank - an interesting idea. I have added it to https://bugs.launchpad.net/webtrees/+bug/1159214

[fisharebest (fisharebest)]

Fix released in 1.5.1