I second that.
Also, it seems as if the starting point of this discussion somehow gets lost.
It was about the javascript redirection simply not working for many million browser configurations - like Firefox running noscript, or IExplorer when extra secure configured (i.e. because you do not add sites to the whitelist when they do not mandatory require JS to work), and, to complete, textbrowsers. But the Firefox and IExlporer figures probably are some magnitudes higher. (I'm not familiar with Chrome, Opera, Safari etc but i guess they also have secure settings and plugins.)
I do not mind if you sent a 503 or 404 or whatever. You will work that out somehow and if it means search engines have to catch up some days then why not, is that actually such a catastrophe ? But i really don't know.
But the point was, this is not about how to HAVE still access to users, but about how to really NOT have access. Wasn't this the point of the protest, to start with ?
So, this will be my last comment on this.
In the time frame we had to implement this, it wasn't possible to do a 100% blackout that would have been completely impenetrable. There were a number of suggestions that could have blacked everything out completely, but very, very likely would have broken things in a way that would have lasted more than the blackout period. We have to consider:
1. Search engines 2. Our caches 3. Upstream caches 4. API users 5. Screen scrapers 6. Things we didn't have time to consider <-- this is a big one
The goal was to inform as many people as possible about the effects of the bills, and I think we were effective at doing so.
- Ryan