On Sun, 03 Oct 2004 15:59:12 +0100, J. Grant jg@jguk.org wrote:

I wonder if you are aware that your web servers are incorrectly configured at present..? (I could be wrong..)

Below is a log from teh W3C link check validation util: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis What to do: The link is forbidden! This needs fixing. Usual suspects: a missing index.html or Overview.html, or a missing ACL. Response status code: 403 Response message: Forbidden Line: 58

The "missing index.html or Overview.html" here is a red herring: all the checker is saying is that when it tries to read the URL listed, it gets a 403 error instead of the web page. I can only think that the validator is sending out a user-agent that is blocked for some reason, or is otherwise being blocked by the servers.

In fact, I notice http://validator.w3.org/about.html mentions the "LWP Perl Modules"; probably the link validator is sending out the default LWP user-agent, which is blocked to avoid badly written bots and spiders.

Using the command-line GET tool:

HEAD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis User-Agent: lwp-request/2.06 HEAD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis --> 403 Forbidden

HEAD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis User-Agent: something else HEAD http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis --> 200 OK