Forum Moderators: mack
We serve web pages with images on, and we place those images into directories constructed with hex codes. So valid subdirectories can be (eg) "/c1/" or, in this case "/ad/". They are pretty random in nature and we do it for internal reasons.
McAfee Privacy Policy filters out the entire "img" tag for the picture we serve - a picture our customer pays to receive from us, and a picture McAfee Privacy Service customers pay to block!
We got in touch with McAfee. "Uninstall and reinstall the Privacy Service" they said. OK, I argued, but eventually realised I would get no more "help" until I had done it. And, guess what? Yup. "No change". They will "pass to development"
But what a naive filter that filters out in the first two letters of the word "Advert" as part of a pathname! How more "old tech" can it be? And worse, how many other poor souls worldwide have installed this and have no idea what they are not getting from websites they want to see?
Why am I posting this here? Well, simply put, this is to let you know what not to design in! To us it was not obvious to avoid the letter combination "ad" at all. With 20/20 hindsight, yes, it's obvious.
It's not as simple as "Don't spend any more money with McAfee". I don't intend to. But my customers have done so - that's the point. And now we have to think about changing our internal structure because McAfee are naive?
Guess what?
Yup, the picture which we serve was no longer blocked!
McAfee are still convinced that:
a) This is not a problem
b) This is because of some corruption and the reinstall was the cure - gasp!
c) That they have no problem with their product
Naturally I kept the transcript of the "live support chat" session where they refused to escalate this to management. Apparently it is not the type of thing one escalates!
But again, my message is 'Avoid a directory named "/ad/" in anything you serve'. I'm afraid I have not checked if the characters "ad" as just the start letters of a directory are ok or not. Maybe someone else would like to.
It was even just a lucky guess at one thirty in the morning that let us realise that this irrational filter was the cause. We'd worked on:
Cookies
Routers (plural)
Firewalls (plural)
We'd eliminated
Adaware
Spybot Search and Destroy
Avast!
We'd run twin virus checks on the affected machine
We installed curl to check if it was a weird and wonderful and unique browser problem, and even curl was /ad/ blocked.
And we started to get angry with each other because we could not solve the problem that was not even our problem!
We'd even forgotten that only one of our machines was McAfee equipped, thinking all else was equal. And we were going insane, trying to solve the insoluble problem.
And the really aggravating thing? I have to keep this rubbish on one machine in order to find stupid problems like this in order to work round them! And that grieves me
How many of us would have spotted the "/ad/" problem in advance?
I am simply taking steps to make sure as many as possible other professional webmasters are pre-warned about this idiocy
McAfee sucks. That is beyond dispute. But people install it in good faith and use it in good faith and then ask people like us "Why can't I see the picture I paid to see?"
And it is not our problem, but it is McAfee's
