Amazingly stupid feature of ad-blocking sw

For weeks, one of our client was receiving customer complaints that some of them are not able to use the web site we built properly. Some features, that are dependent on page-onlaod script execution were simply not working.

Those were all IE/Win users. At same time, they reported that banners at the page top were not visible. We requested screen shots. Almost all of them contained this:

“1 item remaining” message means that page has not finished loading and that none of the scripts executed. This caused the behavior customers mentioned (feature did not work).

Problem was narrowed to Flash banners only and object tag used to display them. Apparently, if the .swf file does not exists, IE will forever try to fetch it, thus never reaching page complete status. Yet another object-related bug in IE. :(

I tried many things, even added the option on the home page to turn Flash off. And still some people complained.

Totally stumped.

And then, today, I saw this on web pages that suck. Ad-blocking software, by default, are not loading files with “banner.”, “ad”, “adclick” and many other in the directory or file name. Client banners are located in banners directory and the file called for them is “banner.asp”. I couldn’t believe it! Stupid, really stupid feature.

This software should be giving me the option to do this myself if I want to, not deliberately forbidding it. Hopefully, when we rename those in the next few days, my days will get brighter.