Macs Forbidden???

[s_mack]

You're probably right, if nobody has ever complained about this prior. I don't have access to a mac, and I'm not going to ask my customer to test for me... and I'm in the middle of re-developing the site from scratch for 1.3.x - so I'm not going to worry about it for now.

I'll ask the customer to try again once I get the new site up. If it still doesn't work, I'll investigate further.

- Steven

[verdon]

Looking into it further...

...
Anyway... July 2003 isn't THAT old, and current browser statistics show that a significant number of users (3-4 percent) still use IE 5.x so I thing it might be worth ZC's time to see what the problem might be... however, I also know we must move on and I would never suggest losing common or popular features over it....

- Steven

That 3-4 percent is Windows IE 5.x users mostly. Mac IE 5.x is a completely different browser from top to bottom, in and out. Although a nice tool in it's time, it is almost completely gone and I would guess it's usage rate at somewhere less than 1/2 of one percent.

[s_mack]

That was my first thought... but when I dug further, about 83% of the 3-4% of IE 5 represents the Mac users. A *VERY* small %age of users use Win IE 5.x. So you got it backwards. It makes sense when you think about it.. .why would anyone use IE5? Its far more likely because they don't have an option (Mac) because if you can upgrade (Win) you would.

- Steven

[DrByte]

Can you check the server's errorlog ? It should tell you the reason for the 403 error. Chances are the 403 is followed by a 404 error as well.

[DrByte]

Peculiar. Just tested on IE 5.2.3 (5815.1) and still has same symptom as 5.2.2

But, FF 1.0, 1.5, Camino 1.0, and Netscape 7.2 Safari 2.0, Opera 9.0 etc are fine

[verdon]

That was my first thought... but when I dug further, about 83% of the 3-4% of IE 5 represents the Mac users. A *VERY* small %age of users use Win IE 5.x. So you got it backwards. It makes sense when you think about it.. .why would anyone use IE5? Its far more likely because they don't have an option (Mac) because if you can upgrade (Win) you would.

Good point, though it would suggest that 1/3 to 1/2 of Mac users are still using IE. That doesn't sound quite right either, but who knows.

As to the problem...
I have some vague memory, that I can't quite recall, about IE 5.x on Mac treating paths to stylesheets, or paths within stylesheets, in some strange manner. Some misinterpretation or bad assumptions about all relative paths being off of root instead of the current dir. I wish I could remember a little better, but perhaps it's something along those lines. Ultimately, as the Dr says, is there anything in your logs?

[Website Rob]

to further answer your Q (in case I did change the htaccess and forgot) here is the one in my root folder:

Options All -Indexes

RedirectMatch permanent ^/$ http://smartieparts.com/shop

Although this may seem like an odd-ball problem, it could be happening to others who are not reporting the problem.

I would suggest you either add a forward slash to the end of your directive:
RedirectMatch permanent ^/$ http://smartieparts.com/shop/

and/or remove "Options All -Indexes".

After all, if you are just wanting to redirect people from your Document Root to the 'shop' dir., not sure why the Options specification would be needed? And if you do work this person again, have them type; http://smartieparts.com/shop/ and then http://smartieparts.com/shop/index.php, directly into their Browser.

If they still have a problem and you try again after removing the whole "Redirect" directive and the problem goes away, you know for sure the problem is on your end and not with any particular Browser.

[s_mack]

Well, its obviously not with every browser, because it works just fine on my computer and the hundreds who have succesfully purchased from me... and I highly doubt they are all typing in the longer url.

Is that .htaccess something I dreamed up once upon a time and don't remember doing? I assumed that was installed there by ZC??? No? I don't want to mess with it if it is core-installed... but if it is a forgotten mod that I did, then certainly I'll fix it. Someone please advise.

DrByte... so you've confirmed the problem? On my site or a test site? Was the 5.2.3 a Mac IE or a Win IE?

I'll dig through the logs and see if I can find it.

- Steven

[s_mack]

hmm.. ok, where are the logs?

On my test server its no problem, but my live one is on a typical shared hosting platform. Would I have access to the ssh logs?

Nevermind... found it.

[s_mack]

No errors registered on that day in the error_log file.

I had errors on days near then, but all related to some error with a "useful links" page I added so I'm sure that's unrelated.

- Steven