As of about a week ago, as far as I can tell, craigslist.org will serve a blank page to users of Internet Explorer on the Macintosh. This affects, in my tests, OS 9 and OS X, version 5.2. I am not sure how earlier version deal with the issue, as I do not have the ability to test.

If you have IE on the Mac, simply try to go to the main page, you should see a totally blank page, as well as blank html source code.

I reported this issue, with my findings, to craiglist support, as of now, nothing more than a automatic email reply. I suspect it has something to do with the 307 redirect they are pushing out.

I ran a packet dump on port 80 to see if I could figure out what was going on. I saw my request go out, and I saw the response come back in. However, what was strange, is they send out a HTTP/1.1 307 Temporary Redirect. Hmpf, never heard of a 307 code before.

307 - Temporary Redirect
307 is the status code that is sent when a document is temporarily available at a different URL, which is also returned. There is very little difference between a 302 status code and a 307 status code. 307 was created as another, less ambiguous, version of the 302 status code.

First of all, I am not entirely sure this is technically a temporary redirect, but that is a matter for the craiglist people to determine. Why they used the 307 over the 302, I have no idea. The location parameter is set to http://example.craigslist.org/ which works fine.

* The subdomain, ‘example’, can be anything, like “buenosaires.craigslist.org”, or “baltimore.craigslist.org”. This proves it is the redirect hanging things up.

Next, I wanted to see if it was IE that was choking, or a server issue on their end. I set up a quick Apache 307 redirect locally on OS X. While the redirect was not automatic, I did get a quick little apache page, that has a link, that takes me where I need to go.

Safari handles the redirect automatically. Just for kicks, I changed the 307 to 301, IE of course fell in love with that, and all was back to normal.

It’s a one character change in their httpd files, I can not believe they have not heard more about this. Their system status page says nothing at all.

Maybe some of you out there have better in’s to support, for me, it took calling the phone number from the WHOIS to even learn what the support email address was. If you figure out anything more about this, feel free to drop a comment.