What can I help with?

[James Titcumb]

Hi folks,

I'm trying to find out if there's anything I can do to help the project. I'm a competent PHP developer - 11 years experience in PHP and Zend Certified Engineer PHP 5.3.

What is the current targets for things? From what I understand, the current system uses outdated legacy Microsoft stuff and that RAD Moose plans to port this to PHP. Does anyone apart from RAD Moose (and Gary Keith) know what the actual process for generating the files is?

Perhaps I could assist in writing a new website? Or contribute to the browscap-php component?

Thanks

James

[Gary K]

James: The files were created via a VB6 app using MS SQL Server 2000 as the database and an FTP component to upload files to the website.

[James Titcumb]

Gary - Is there any chance you would start the project back up again, even if only temporarily to assist in porting the system to an open, maintainable community so that this project doesn't die?

RAD Moose is apparently broke and it sounds like his internet has been disconnected and appears to have some personal issues - I've got nothing against the guy, but it's causing this project to die.

Is there anything we can do?

[James Titcumb]

Gary - or anyone,

Is the tools/applications/source etc. whatever is required to do this available on GitHub or anywhere else?

Thanks

James

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[Gary K]

Wow, it's so sad what's happened to Moose. He's a good guy who had good intentions, but he just couldn't catch a break from life.

I'm not interested in hosting and/or maintaining the browscap project. Besides, I transferred control/ownership of everything to Moose which means, for example, I'm not an admin of either browscap or browscap-dev. And since he's no longer online I can't get that stuff back.

I have all the files you asked about. Contact me off-list to discuss exactly what you need.

[Shane Walker]

I'm trying to formulate a plan for launching this where control can be held by multiple 'admins' with an entirely new back-end to manage everything. I'm not sure what we can do about group/domain controls but count me in for getting something less dependent on an individual to prevent unfortunate circumstances like this from happening.

Shane

[Gary K]

I've been in touch with James via e-mail and you two seem to want to do the same things with the project which is awesome! I'm waiting on James to tell me what database format he wants the user agent patterns in. Maybe you can contact James and work on it together?

[Mindshare Studios]

I'll pitch in however I can too. I have PHP/JS/mySQL skills. I also have some dedicated servers we could host files on if needed.

Damian

[Gary K]

I heard from Moose this evening and he's not doing well but he does get a very small amount of internet time now and then and will be keeping the temporary site up and running, at least for now.

If you all will let me know which major browsers need to be updated in the files I will get those changes to Moose and he'll post an update. I'd prefer you format suggestions this way:

Chrome 22
Chrome 23
Firefox 21
Firefox 22
Firefox 23

If it's a beta version please append (beta) to it like this:
Firefox 23 (beta)

Once that's done then we can address other issues like creating a master browscap.ini on GitHub that everyone can submit changes to, getting the website itself updated to use PHP instead of ASP Classic and also updating the backend tools to something more modern than Visual Basic 6.

[Gary K]

Oh, and some user agent strings would be helpful because I understand, for example, that Opera has changed their rendering engine so I'd like to see an example of it.

[James Titcumb]

I appreciate the offer Damian and Shane - my plan is to set up the GitHub soon. I'll start a new thread today concerning only the redevelopment and making a game plan - if you guys can watch out for that, that'd be great :-)

Gary - regarding new user agents, I will try and compile a list of changes from various group posts since the last update and post back here.

Thanks
James

[James Titcumb]

Gary, this is a collection of user agent strings I have found since v5019 (March 2013) release:

Firefox 19

Mozilla/5.0 (Android; Tablet; rv:19.0) Gecko/19.0 Firefox/19.0

To fix SRWare Iron identifying as Chrome, change:

[Mozilla/5.0 (*Windows NT 5.2*) AppleWebKit/* (KHTML, like Gecko) *Iron/23.* Safari/*]

to

[Mozilla/5.0 (*Windows NT 5.2*WOW64) AppleWebKit/* (KHTML, like Gecko) *Iron/23.* Safari/*]

1. Chrome 26 (desktop)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.31 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/26.0.1410.64 Safari/537.31

2. IE10 Mobile (desktop mode)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0; ARM; Touch; WPDesktop)

3. IE10 Mobile (mobile mode)

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)

4. iPhone 5 Safari (mobile)

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3

5. iPad Safari (mobile)

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10

Chrome 28: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/browscap/uDNE5vZwJMo

Android: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/browscap/YDCSnp5AspQ

IE 11 on Windows 8.1: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko

Nexus browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 4.2.2; Galaxy Nexus Build/JDQ39) AppleWebKit/537.22 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/25.0.1364.123 Mobile Safari/537.22

iPhone 6.1 (may already be in?): Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B141 Safari/8536.25

I can see the files have Chrome 27, my latest Chrome is 28, so that will need adding. My UA is: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.71 Safari/537.36

Additionally, I have just under 1,200 user agent strings that resolve to "Default browser" on our system since 14th March... I don't know if you want to look at them? :)

Hope this helps

Thanks

James

[Shane Walker]

There are some existing repos available in the browscap GitHub account.

https://github.com/browscap

[James Titcumb]

Shane

Indeed there is - I am not sure whether Joshua (the owner of that organisation) was trying to achieve the same goal. I have sent him an email off list, hopefully he will reply! :)

The "browscap" repo itself looks like some Symfony-based code, but I haven't looked into enough to find out what he's trying to do. It also hasn't been updated for 5 months or so.

Hopefully Joshua will reply soon.

James

[James Titcumb]

I don't know what Moose's status is, but the poor guy is clearly having a hard time.

I strongly think that making sure the back end uses GitHub as much as possible is by far the best option. Pull requests are a really easy way to contribute, and you can have multiple admins.

I have emailed Gary off list to see if we can get the current system. I pledge to be open about to ensure there is no single owner!

[Gary K]

Thanks, James. I'm sure I'll have a few questions for you.

[Gary K]

To fix SRWare Iron identifying as Chrome, change:
[Mozilla/5.0 (*Windows NT 5.2*) AppleWebKit/* (KHTML, like Gecko) *Iron/23.* Safari/*]
to
[Mozilla/5.0 (*Windows NT 5.2*WOW64) AppleWebKit/* (KHTML, like Gecko) *Iron/23.* Safari/*]

1) What about people who aren't in a 64-bit environment?

2) Also, does this get added to all upcoming Iron releases—in the upcoming update the files will support up to Iron 32.0?

Thanks,

PS. I'm not sure what happened to my reply so I'm sorry if this is a duplicate post.

[James Titcumb]

Gary -

1) I would assume the report meant to add a new match for Win 64 vs Win 32 for Iron

2) From what I can see, the latest Iron is 28 (same as Chrome), so we may have to expand the Iron versions if we don't have them already (I haven't been able to look)

[James Titcumb]

Gary -

Looks like there are a load of extra user agents in this class: 

https://github.com/quentin389/UserAgentInfo/blob/master/BrowscapWrapper.class.php

James

On Monday, 29 July 2013 08:18:38 UTC+1, James Titcumb wrote:

Gary -

[Gary K]

1) Good, because that's how I did it! :)

2) I've updated Chromium, Chrome and Iron to recognize up to v32.0.

Thanks.

[Gary K]

There's so much source code in it. ;/

[James Titcumb]

Hi Gary

I think the actual UA matches (they've done them as PCREs) are from L140 (link: https://github.com/quentin389/UserAgentInfo/blob/master/BrowscapWrapper.class.php#L140)

It should be possible to de-tangle these into Browscap format UA matches... the only thing missing is distinct versions (because they've used regex matching), so there may be a bit of Google required.

[Mikolaj Misiurewicz]

https://github.com/quentin389/UserAgentInfo/blob/master/BrowscapWrapper.class.php#L121 - one user agent which I had to override, because I wanted to ban YaCy-Bot

https://github.com/quentin389/UserAgentInfo/blob/master/BrowscapWrapper.class.php#L140 - matches for user agents which were not present in browscap, matched using PCREs. In some cases I'm dynamically matching and filling major and / or minor browser versions.

https://github.com/quentin389/UserAgentInfo/blob/master/BrowscapWrapper.class.php#L537 - matches for user agents which were not present in browscap, matched 1-to-1 as full strings.

All the entries were created to recognise actual user agents present in the wild. I wasn't always adding entries for 100% of unrecognised UAs, but I was adding either entries for most popular user browsers or most spammy bots. So, this list is a representation of most important additions, based on users from real estate Polish website with more than 1.5 million user vists per month.