That is quite true, but ultimately irrelevant to the article's point, which is that they are seemingly locking users out just for the heck of it.

Probably not just for the heck of it. The press might have factored in.

No, it's not irrelevant. Someday the site will change in a way such that it no longer happens to work in IE. But since they don't support IE, it won't be a bug.

Support is a commitment to people, not a mere technical hurdle.

Maybe. I wouldn't really bet on the site becoming completely unusable in IE, but I suppose it's a remote possibility. Let's be generous to your argument and call it a 25% chance. At any rate, you're right that it would be irresponsible to say they support IE if they aren't willing to fix it in such a case.

But because there's a 25% chance that the site could break sometime in the future, they go out of their way to break it right now? That's what they're talking about, and it's orthogonal to the idea of choosing what configurations to support.

At the company where I work, we don't support people trying to eat the newspapers we put out, but we don't go out of our way to make the newspapers poisonous either.

Not supporting it is fine. User agent sniffing is obnoxious.

Yes, but the site working provides absolutely no reason to actively block it. Display an 'upgrade your browser' message fine, but actively block a certain browser based on user agent string? Ridiculous.

The original Paydirt thread contained some reasonable arguments against including a "Try it anyway" link. For example, to prevent people from clicking through and then complaining anyway.