Kind of an extreme heading, but that’s how I feel. It all started with a client sending an email noting that some of the computers in their office couldn’t see three graphics on the home page. Three kind of important graphics because they are of sponsors of a major event and it’s important that everyone can see the sponsors’ logos.
I looked at the site with every browser I could get my hands on (safari and firefox on the mac, ie 6 on windows, ie 7 on windows) and I could always see the graphics. I happened to be going in for a meeting to that client, so I spent some time there troubleshooting the problem.
First strange thing was that it wasn’t just that the browser (IE 6 or IE 7) wasn’t showing the image, the entire tag was gone, erased from the source of the page. That made me think it was some kind of security software doing it.
I couldn’t figure out the difference between the computers that saw the graphic and those that didn’t (all were Windows XP, the browsers were either IE 6 or IE 7), but their computer guy figured out that it was Norton Internet Security.
I did a little searching on the web, now that I knew that Norton was the culprit and found this web site: http://menumachine.com/mm1docs/instruction_pages/troubleshooting/norton.html, a troubleshooting guide for something called MenuMachine. It very clearly says that Norton Internet Security uses a clumsy method of blocking ads: it looks for certain strings in the name of the file. These strings include ‘ad,’ and ‘advertisement,’ no surprise there, but they also include ’sponsor’ and that’s where my trouble was.
As I said before, the graphics that were disappearing were sponsors’ logos and I put those graphics in a folder called ’sponsors.’ And Norton Internet Security then deleted those graphics from my web site because it decided they were an ad.
I would argue that there is a difference between sponsors and ads, sponsors usually have something to do with the site. They aren’t the pop-up ads telling you you have a virus and should click on the button so they can actually install malware on your computer. And, besides, I figured out what was going on, I bet all those annoying ad people have figured it out as well, so Norton Internet Security is pretty worthless (which was what I thought anyways). All it does is make web designers tear their hair out.
