K World

A funny feature (or mod) in vBulletin Boards, possibly in other message board scripts too. Have you ever faced this kind of situation ?

1. You need to download something
2. You search in Google and you get some relevant results
3. You click on that and you go to that site
4. You see that the content (or the link to the download) which you needed is not shown instead a message like “This part of the post is available only to registered users” is shown.

I’ve faced that situation. These days, many message boards are coming up with a feature named “Premium Content” which would be available only to registered users. But, in order to get traffic from search engines, those coders are giving an option to let search engines index the premium content. That is the reason why you see the snippet of the content in Google but not when you go to that site.

Here is the tip. Either try to read in the Google cache or become Google Yourself !!! How would you become Google ? Answer is simple, spoof your User-agent to Google. These boards do nothing more than checking your headers.

In firefox, download an extension like User Agent Switcher or Modify Headers and change your user-agent to “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)” and this would make the site think that You are Google.

In firefox, there is another option. In address bar type “about:config”, create a new string named “general.useragent.override” and set the value to “Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)”. Don’t forget all the values without quotes. And this method broke my Gmail as it stops loading Javascript thinking that I’m really incompatible. So, avoid this.

If you use IE, you better switch to firefox for happy browsing. But, if you don’t want to switch and still want my tip, yeah, open registry editor and do whatever you want at
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent

After doing this, just check whether your settings are fine or not @ UserAgent.org. If you want to try something different, telnet to the host on port number 80, and spoof those headers yourself.

Instead doing all this, you can prove that you are very boring by either registering at that site or go check whether there are any working entries at BugMeNot.com, login and read the required information.

BTW, yet another tip which might be useful. An “X-Forwarded-For” header will make the server think that you are a proxy server for the IP address in the value field of that header. In simple words, an IP address like “72.14.2o7.99″ in “X-forwarded-For” header might make the server think that you are a proxy for “72.14.2o7.99″ and save that IP in the log instead of yours. A stupid site like Rediff will give you it’s Rediff Abroad Page thinking that it’s so intelligent to grab your real location using that header because 72.14.2o7.99 is IP address of Google, location is Ca, USA.

Have Fun. Happy Spoofing