As some of you might have noticed, the number of guests online were sometimes ridiculously high. This is of course caused by automated bots, like for example spiders of search engines or harvesters for e-mail addresses to send spam to.

Last night, I've refined the code to identify such bots (because it's silly to list them as 'online users'). I'm keeping an eye on it myself, too, of course, but I can't be online all the time. So if you still notice any irregularly high numbers (i.e. above 25 or so), please let me know.

Eighter I can't find the post anymore or it never got into the database.

I posted a problem to this thread in the beginning of this week. When submitting, I was redirected to the confirmation page but the text (that you have posted and will be redirected) was missing from within the box.

I wasn't logged in at the time so I had the fill in the password and username at the top of the post. The browser that I used was IE 6.0 SP1 (I think). Let me try this tommorrow from work (if I don't forget it).

Thanks, that bug is already fixed by now. Cypherswipe reported it via private message, because public posting (as you've noticed) wasn't possible. So, for the public record of my shame, I had just forgotten a semicolon in one of the new lines when I put up the latest code enhancements a few days ago, and this lead to posts not being saved at all. That error had very different visible effects depending on the user's browser (yours tried to render the page anyway, making it look as if nothing really bad happened, Cypherswipe's gave up completely with a nasty error message).

Gecko based browsers gave an XML error page. Opera gave a very similar error page, but also included an option to render as HTML. Clicking this option produced a blank page with a very short grey (but empty) table at the top where all the links are supposed to be. I didn't bother trying IE at the time, but based on my experience with opera, it sounds like IE rendered it as HTML.

Yes, the reason for the different behaviour is that Internet Explorer can't render XHTML at all (it has zero support for it, which is an arbitrary limitation, because its XML capabilities are one of the few things Microsoft doesn't have to be ashamed of), so it always renders as HTML. And in case you've always been wondering why XHTML hasn't really been taken up by big sites in spite of being the recommended standard for eight years, you now know the reason...