Help...Links to cgi script not visible tosome visitors?

[kissels]

For some time, I have been using the WebAdverts program on my site to provide advertisers with some basic tracking stats. The program itself is intended for banner rotation, but I was able to jimmy it so that it works with static links. My site is http://chicagolandwedding.com. If you go to any of the Vendor Guides on the site, you will find (on most) a table of vendor listings with a blue/green left-hand border...to the right of each listing you should also find a "Website" button and, in most cases an "Email" button (and on some also a "Coupon" button but that button is not pertinent to this problem).

Now... the problem.... I am encountering, albiet occasionally, a situation where some visitors to my site are unable to see the "Website" buttons, and also the "Advertiser Login" buttons on my site because they are linked to this cgi script; they simply do not appear on these visitor's screens. I have learned that this is because the visitors' firewall settings are preventing them from viewing the links.

Any help finding an explanation/fix for this problem would be much appreciated. I lost an advertiser last week because of this issue and am now wondering, if this has affected 3 or 4 advertisers out of approx. 300, how many site visitors out of approx 10,000/month are also affected by this problem. If a bride/groom can not click through to an advertiser's website, then that potential business is lost for my advertiser.

Thanks in advance for taking the time....

Kim

[kissels]

Still waiting for someone who knows something about cgi script vs. firewalls to chime in.... Thanks

Kim

[speed]

Norton Internet Security in it's default mode is very good at removing bits a pieces from the site that it considers advertising, other firewalls do the same.

The path to the script contains the word "adverts", the script is called "ads.pl" and finally you have "banner" as a parameter. There's a whole list of bad words which can cause items to be stripped from the page.

You might want to set up a test area, then try renaming the path to the script to avoid ad or any derivative and rewrite the script to use something other than banner for the parameter e.g.

http://chicagolandwedding.com/cgi/l/out.pl?c=aaweddings

There's no guarantee that doing this will solve it but it should help.

I've seen an image file stripped from a page for being called banner.jpg, it was actually the title banner of the page not an ad.

The other thing to watch out for is the size of images, some standard banner sizes cause the image to be stripped from the page without a trace, even if the image isn't advertising.

Finally some firewalls will block the referrer information so if you are using that at all you'll need to rewrite your code to avoid it.

I've seen sites using hotlink protection issue "Don't hotlink" messages to legitimate visitors browsing their site because the visitors firewall has blocked referrer info.

Hope that helps.