Over the past year I’ve heard more complaints about viewing web sites than I care to remember. In nearly every instance common denominator is that the user trying to view the page is using Norton Firewall. I’ve viewed Wizbang behind corporate firewalls, the firewall built into Windows Service Pack 2, in IE and Firefox, on Linux, on Mac’s, etc… and never had a problem with the Javascript code that allows the comments and extended entries to pop back and forth. Only Norton seems to have an issue with the ScriptyGoddess originated code.
I’m off to see if there’s any fix short of creating a Norton version of the main page.
Anyone have a shortcut answer to this problem?
Update: I’ve update to the latest version of the ScriptyGoddess script. If anyone wants to know or troubleshoot the problem Norton has with this all the code is available in the page source. There is one Javascript function for the show/hide process and two for popups. Since I don’t have Norton I’m going on second hand information, but I’ve been told that only the page background loads. This makes some sense if the page stops loading at the occurrence of that Javascript which is (by necessity) in the page header.
If Norton has a “trusted sites” setting I would imagine that adding Wizbang to that would allow page loads. Any Norton users want to try that?
Update 2: It turns out that the ad blocker in Norton Internet Security inserts it’s own code into the page, often breaking pages. Details here. The short answer is turn off the ad-blocking in Norton – the long answer is get a better firewall.
My answer to most Norton’s problems is to nuke Norton’s. Not the program, the corporate headquarters.
But seriously, I don’t know how your script operates, but most problems associated with Norton’s and web sites come from Norton’s not sending a complete set of headers. But that’s also usually on server-side stuff and I have no idea if it would affect javascript or not.
It would be helpful to know what, exactly, the problem is that people are experiancing. For instance, if Norton is just blocking the script from running, then one thing that you could do is to have all the comments displaying as block by default, but have a script run on pageload and hide them. That way if the script doesn’t run, you can still see the comments. Although, you might want to do this only for the “there’s more” links, as you already have a link to a comments pop-up window. Also, whenever I’ve done similar scripts, I do so by switching between two classes, not changing styles, but I don’t know what the difference would be to Norton.
Ith had trouble with commenting on our site at one point, or maybe it was my old site, and it turned out to be Norton Firewall. As I recall, she had to change her settings, but I am not sure if it was something like adding an exclusion or changing a more global setting.
I would never dream of making a version of the site to cater to people with dysfunctional firewall software, even if I knew how.
FWIW I’m running Firefox behind ZoneAlarm and have no problems here.
Running Norton’s here and no problems. Me thinks the problem is a customer chosen setting rather than just blanket blaming of the software.
FWIW, Norton’s does a lot of analyzing of scriipts for things like spyware so it’s possible a lot of script use may trigger something if people have tightened down their settings.
Sounds like Norton, as intercepting proxy, is running the html through a filter that blocks your particular JS snippet. I’d guess different customers have the filters tweaked different ways to process JS. You may need to instruct them on how to set a filter not to purge JS from Wizbang and promise them that you won’t try to hack their system with blackhat code. Can we trust you?
Maybe you could bribe Faith+1 into offering a tutorial. Not that I’m recruiting by proxy or anything.
As one of the readers who have made comments about this problem over the last year, I can confirm that I am behind a Norton Firewall. This is the only site that I have come across with this particular problem. I last noticed it in late September and early October 2004 and again over the last two weeks. The site and Norton appear to be working in harmony now. If this happens again I will tinker with the firewall settings and report any useful findings.
I’m running Firefox behind Norton Internet Security 2005 on Windows XP Pro. One thing I like about this site is that it works so well. I would never have know that others have problems with Norton if I hadn’t read this post.
I’m one of those running NIS2003 and I have seen this problem sporadically with Wizbang. Disabling the NIS ad blocking did not do the problem. Disabling all NIS features did not fix the problem. Only turning off NIS entirely fixed the problem.
Coincidentally, I used to do phone tech support on the NIS product line and these types of symptoms aren’t fixable; what’s going on is that there is some piece of code that NIS doesn’t like, only it’s beyond the NIS configuration capacity. So all you can do is to turn off the firewall completely, as I have been doing.
Sucks, but what can you do?
Pay the 10-bucks-after-rebate for a hardware firewall/router and pitch the Norton schlock?
Oh, and of course, get Firefox.