Why can’t my password-protected page be viewed in Japan? [Archive]

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nepas

01-19-2009, 06:55 AM

I have a $13/month Geocities domain with a password-protected subdirectory, inside of which I have an html page that apparently cannot be accessed in Japan.

I talked to Yahoo support, and they were able to view it in India, as I have been in both U.S. and Europe.

I had the same problem with China, but there I thought that it was being blocked by the Great Firewall of China...there is no such explanation for Japan.

The support guy thought that browser language settings might be at fault.

Neither the password nor the user name have any special characters, it’s all lowercase letters, not even numbers.

I switched text encoding to Japanese (Shift JIS) on my FireFox, and it logged me in just fine.

I removed the default

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

line from the create-page window in Yahoo file manager.

Could that have anything to do with it?

Again, even without the line, the page is accessible on three continents.

Thank you,

NP

felgall

01-19-2009, 07:14 PM

That doctype line isn't going to make any difference - coded like that it just tells browsers to display the page using quirks mode which is exactly what you get when you omit the doctype. The only time the doctype would have any effect on the page is that using a full doctype rather than that incomplete one would put the page into standards mode so that all browsers display it the same way. That still wouldn't affect whether the page can be accessed or not. The password protection is applied to the subdirectory without affecting any of the visible pages within it. There would be separate hidden files defining the password handling. If the server is running Apache then the files would be .htaccess and .htpasswd

nepas

01-20-2009, 06:40 AM

Thank you for responding. So, no idea why they can't access it?

nepas

01-21-2009, 07:42 AM

The Japanese person said that the password window popped up, but rejected the password and username that I provided...

hmanxy

01-21-2009, 02:29 PM

I worked on a site that needed simple password protection that needed to be accessed by individuals in Japan. We used an ASP snippet of code that worked well and we did not experience any issues whatsoever with our contacts in Japan.

If yahoo allows you to use ASP functionality this may be the solution you were looking for. Let me know your thoughts and if this helps.

kiwibrit

01-21-2009, 02:50 PM

I have used .htaccess protected directory protected stuff accessed successfully in Japan - so there should not be a difficulty. Just a thought - are you using some character which may not directly available on a Japanese keyboard?

nepas

01-22-2009, 11:31 AM

Thank you for responding.

I am not using any code for the protection; Yahoo Small Business File Manager lets you create "protected" (as opposed to public) directories, and then create user names with passwords and decide which protected directories (and whatever they contain, like html pages) can be accessed with them.

I bugged a random Japanese guy on Skype long enough to find out that he could view the page by using a second password/username pair that I assigned to the directory.
It makes no sense, as both pairs are made of normal alphabetical characters, no symbols or even numbers.

I will look into it further, but at this time it seems that for some inexplicable reason, the password and username (which work perfectly in U.S. and Europe) were to blame.

hmanxy

01-22-2009, 11:49 AM

I am glad you were able to find a work around. If you ever are in need of the asp script I was referring to, let me know. Good luck.