Geoff Fraizer

[Bolty]

http://www.battle.net/news/secret

-Bolty

[Vandiablo]

But where do I get my Special Ring of Decoding?

[Doc]

Well the cat's out of the bag I guess, no more secret.

While I was a little suprised to learn that Tipper Gore is actually Diablo, The Lord of Terror, and he has come to invade our world, I always suspected she was a force of great evil.

[Pu uhonua]

"Woah! You were too smart for us"

That's really funny...

Not being a very good trial and error type of person, I had to view the HTML to figure it out...

I'm almost afraid to ask, but, how in the world did you find that?

[Obi2Kenobi]

Well, he would tell, but it's a secret. :P

[DeeBye]

Not being a very good trial and error type of person, I had to view the HTML to figure it out...

When I KNOW that there is a "secret hidden message" in a webpage, my first instinct is to always left-click and drag across the empty areas.

Also, Blizzard displays a 1x1 pixel transparent .gif on that page. You won't see a damned thing by clicking on that link. I just wanted to show you that it existed.

-DeeBye

[[wcip]Angel]

I'm slow :)

Teach me, oh great one!

I managed to get into http://www.battle.net/news/secret/realsupe...ecretpage.shtml, I marked everything, but didn't see anything particularly interesting.

[Baajikiil]

When I KNOW that there is a "secret hidden message" in a webpage, my first instinct is to always left-click and drag across the empty areas.

I picked up that technique on Ebay; Someone had included in the description of an item the names of all products even slightly related to the auction item. About 20 lines all written in "secret hidden message script".

It took me a minute to figure out why the heck the item was coming up when I was looking for something different.

[Count Duckula]

I picked up that technique on Ebay;  Someone had included in the description of an item  the names of all products even slightly related to the auction item.  About 20 lines all written in  "secret hidden message script".

This ain't nothin' new--browsers and crawlers and webpages keep invisible text that nobody's supposed to read but a search engine. Makes me kinda mad that I know what I'm looking for but it looks like Google doesn't!

[Tal]

This ain't nothin' new--browsers and crawlers and webpages keep invisible text that nobody's supposed to read but a search engine. Makes me kinda mad that I know what I'm looking for but it looks like Google doesn't!

Are you thinking of Meta tags? If so you can still read those in the Header of the HTML.

[NiteFox]

And they're paying him... how much? :huh:

[Count Duckula]

Are you thinking of Meta tags? If so you can still read those in the Header of the HTML.

Not just that, Tal. Ever type in a phrase to a search engine, then a page comes up that has nothing to do with the phrase, but has a lot of invisible text at the top or bottom of the page that has a whole list of words in 3-pt font?

Not quite meta tags, but still sneaky.

[NiteFox]

Thanks, Pir, for the near-concussion I just received as I attempted to drag down my big ol' book o' HTML from the shelves above my computer. Ow. Maybe I should be a better housekeeper.

I'll keep looking through, but from what I know of search engines is that they are Not Smart™. In other words, if the crawler bot hits a page with certain words on it, then it will catalogue that page indexing by those words. Make the font 3pt, (<font size=1>), and make the text colour the same as the BG, and you've essentially got a load of "invisible" text that is pure spider bait.

Plus, there's also the old trick of using alternate frameset pages. If you have a frameset for frames, then you should assign an alternate page in case a browser cannot process frames, in other words if your frameset page is index.html then the assigned alternate page may be index2.html. Now search engines cannot process frames in their summaries, and even if they hit index.html then the summary beneath the link will be the contents of index2.html. That's why you see an awful lot of "Your browser cannot view frames" links on Google. The reason why that quote happens a lot is because if you don't bother to assign a page yourself, then a default one is made for you.

And remember: Never try to catch a 1200+ page hardback book with your forehead :P

[Tal]

Not just that, Tal. Ever type in a phrase to a search engine, then a page comes up that has nothing to do with the phrase, but has a lot of invisible text at the top or bottom of the page that has a whole list of words in 3-pt font?

Not quite meta tags, but still sneaky.

Ah - thought thats what you meant but wanted to make sure. :)

[Bolty]

Well, he would tell, but it's a secret. :P

Actually, you're right! :)

-Bolty

[Quark]

Websites use them as trackers for people who don't use cookies. Too bad for Blizzard (and other cookie-mongering/etc websites) that my web browser ignores those images :P

(Gotta love Firebird with a userContent.css that gets rid of 99.9% of the ads out there)

[WarLocke]

All hail to the Firebird!

The absence of popups was worth the switchover in itself, and the faster load times, better interface in general, etc. are just icing on the cake. :lol:

... Although I still get the occasional Explorer window popping up autonomously. It doesn't happen enough to be a big problem, but I wish I knew how to fix it so I could have a Totally Ad-Free Computing Experience...

[Count Duckula]

And remember: Never try to catch a 1200+ page hardback book with your forehead. :P

I used to catch basketballs with my face, so it's all okay. :lol:

Seriously though, I don't know what any of the terms mean, which is probably the reason why the website's taking so friggin' long.

What's a spider? First person to describe arachnids gets whacked with Nico's helm, right after I steal it back.

[whyBish]

A spider is a software creation that crawls ovre the worldwide web (web crawler/spider) catalogging web pages. It is usually used by:
1) Search engines looking to find and classify websites
2) Spammers (like me ;) ) that are looking for email addresses

[NiteFox]

Bingo. A small prize to whyBish for the speediest response.

Google seems to be running the most spiders ATM, given that for any ten crawlers I've seen on the Star Alliance's forum, nine are Googlebots. Any bored admin might spend the day watching their forum's "Who's Online" list and counting how many bots appear on their board. An oddly worthwhile excersice, given that your forum regs will be happy for you banning e-mail bots.