On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 5:19 PM, max b <maxb.personal@gmail.com> wrote:

Hey folks,

I enabled the "garden gnome" on the production exit server. What this should do is trigger certain operating system's network connectivity probes so that they'll show a splash page when people join the network. It's designed to be as minimally intrusive as possible, so it only captures probes to the specific urls that OSX/iOS/Android/Windows test to see if they're connected to the internet.

Once a user clicks "go to the internet", that IP will be added to a white list so they won't see the splash page again for 24 hours.

Please please please let me know if there are any issues that you encounter. We absolutely don't want to have people unable to connect to the network for some reason or another. I don't really have enough devices to test on, so it's very possible that there could be an issue somewhere. There are a couple design bits that I know I need to polish, but I'm open to constructive feedback on any aspect of it.

There is a serious problem on Android. When connecting to peoplesopen.net it will say "Connected" but then when you try to use the internet it will actually use your 4G bandwidth. This is terrible. You do get a notification with the captive portal but it does not get shown. Instead you have to manually go to the list of notifications to discover this notification. This happens even when you manually go to wifi settings and connect. Realistically this will just make people upset, since we're saying "yeah you're connected" but then they end up using their limited paid bandwidth. I have no idea if there is a fix but if there isn't then we will probably have to turn it off for android. We tested this both on a stock Samsung Galaxy S3 (I think? Jenny?) and a OnePlus One running Cyanogen.

Also, the behavior should be that clicking anywhere on the page should close the captive portal view and allow you through and this should be obvious: The first thing you see should be a big "ok thanks now go away" button that is very easy to hit. If you click a "learn more" button then it can open a real browser with more info, or it can scroll down to more info. You definitely should not have to scroll down and click a link to make it go away (the current behavior).

Another minor issue I discovered on my home iMac. I have set it to go into standby after a few minutes, so every time I sit down it wakes up and reconnects, and just as I'm typing in a URL it gives me this popup. Every single time. Is this because we are not remembering IP addresses for mac devices? It would be nice if it only showed up once a week or something like that. I think we should generally err on the side of being less annoying even if it means some people never see the popup. When we launch the network it might even make sense to only enable the popup for e.g. 1 month for every new home node deployed and then forever disable it for that home node's IP range.

--

marc/juul

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