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Requirement for authentication.

Alan on 24 March 2023, 2 years ago

There are certain websites that I check for their technologies but I get back the error:

Homepage access requires authentication (username and password)

Yet it is possible to view these websites as normal without having to use authentication.

Can anyone explain?

Sam Soltano (site administrator) on 26 March 2023, 2 years ago

That message means that we see HTTP code 401 when fetching the home page. We would need to know the URL to investigate that further.

Alan on 27 March 2023, 2 years ago

If it is because the crawler sees a 401 code, why does it say "Homepage access requires authentication (username and password)" rather than saying "your website returned a 401 error code"?

Anyway, here is an example website that has this problem. https://interactfireprotection.com/

And here is another: https://www.gasco-uk.com/

I look forward to reading your comments.

Sam Soltano (site administrator) on 27 March 2023, 2 years ago

These sites obviously return different HTTP codes depending on the client IP. In these cases we rotate the location from where we fetch the pages, until we find a location that is accepted. I did this manually in your examples, the automatic process takes a bit longer.

Alan on 27 March 2023, 2 years ago

To be honest I don't understand your answer. Just concentrating on this site: https://www.gasco-uk.com/

why does this return a 401 on w3techs.com, but anyone can go to a browser and visit the website without any issues?

Sam Soltano (site administrator) on 27 March 2023, 2 years ago

That seems to be the way that server is configured. It is, for example, not uncommon to block visitors from specific countries for legal reasons. That's why we fetch sites from various locations. You would need to consult the webmaster of that site to find out what the motivation in that specific case is.

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