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Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by ChuckMcM on Friday April 04, 2014 @02:25PM (#7533325)
Sigh, did no one notice that the link is in a <span id="hide"> ? Look at the style sheet and note that class 'hide' sets the link to be the same color as the background (it makes it invisible to humans) and yet it got clicked on anyway.

There are bad actors out there, they exploit services, and one of the ways the services detect them is to create situations that a script would follow but that a human would not. When they do something bad you've got a couple of choices, cut them off or lie to them (some of the Bing markov generated search pages for robots are pretty fun))

So she sends an email to the address provided, they talk to her, she gets educated and they re-enable access. If it happens again the issue gets escalated. Its the circle of fraud.

Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by abruzzi on Friday April 04, 2014 @02:56PM (#7533516)
Some people also override site based CSS with their own, which could likely make the link that was intended to be hidden come unbidden. Most browsers I've used have that option.
Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by ChuckMcM on Friday April 04, 2014 @04:22PM (#7534067)
True, I've done this for sites that had really slow loading webfonts and/or remote css pages. Although we really can't say what it looked like without the rest of the page contents. I don't suppose anyone has a page source dump.

I wonder sometimes if this sort of activity (honey pots for autobanning) angers people because they feel they have a right to script the site or if they feel poorly for "falling for" the honeypot. Clearly it generates some emotion though.

Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by cesarb on Friday April 04, 2014 @06:45PM (#7534938)
No need to override the CSS, if your connection is unstable enough the CSS load can simply fail, and the page will display unstyled.
Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC on Friday April 04, 2014 @09:18PM (#7535569)
There even are browsers out there that simply don't support CSS.
Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by dllthomas on Friday April 04, 2014 @09:54PM (#7535657)
Lynx seems a likely candidate, though I'm not positive it has zero support.
Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by pseut on Saturday April 05, 2014 @03:52PM (#7538208)
Konqueror on RHEL seems more likely than Lynx.
Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by danudey on Friday April 04, 2014 @03:12PM (#7533639)
A link the same colour as the background can still be seen (e.g. if it's selected by accident, or by Select All), can still be clicked on whether it's seen or not, etc.
Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by spb on Friday April 04, 2014 @06:22PM (#7534822)
Some people view source.
Re:American Chemical Society bans university after "spider-t... by thaumasiotes on Saturday April 05, 2014 @05:17AM (#7536495)
True enough, but we might expect those people to have some idea of what a spider trap is.

I definitely noticed that the tag was <span id="hide">, though... that raises all kinds of interesting questions like "what if I want to hide more than one thing on the page?" and "if I'm going to do this, why not display="none" instead of just adjusting the text color on the link?"