Setting charsets via IIS MIME types is harmful

Previously, in this post, I recommended that webmasters tweak their IIS MIME type settings so that static HTML files would specify a charset of UTF-8. It turns out that this causes some problems.

The issue is that some web crawlers / search engines send an HTTP request header like the following:

Accept: text/html

If you’ve configured IIS MIME types to send “text/html; charset=utf-8”, this does not match “text/html”, so IIS will actually return an error (i.e. a 40x or 50x HTTP status code), and the page contents will not be returned to the crawler.

Thus, one should not do as I’ve described in this post. Oh well, looks like setting the charset via a Meta Tag is the way to go for static HTML pages.

I happened to discover this issue by running LogParser on my IIS log files, looking for any unexpected HTTP status codes.

MySpace Account Hacking

After this post, I get a lot of questions like:

• I think my spouse/SO/etc. is cheating on me. How do I hack their MySpace so I can find out what’s going on?
• Help, someone hacked my MySpace and took over my account. How do I get it back? (Similarly: I forgot my password or somehow it got changed, what do I do now?)

Here’s some info from the MySpace site that may help you recover your account:

• Response to questions or concerns about compromised accounts
• Steps to take if a user forgets their username or email address

For more help, please see MySpace Top FAQs.