posted on July 5, 2001 07:18:14 PM new
Just to let you guys who have a paypal link in their auction know - I tried to look at one today and it loads OK - then when the PayPal link which apparently Adsubtract sees as a banner ad tries to load the auction page disappears and I get a can not load page error message for paypal.
I am not going to shut off my adsubtract in order to view such auctions folks.
I get the same thing trying to view comics on the local paper. They load and then when the banner ad won't load I get an error page.
posted on July 5, 2001 09:47:48 PM new
I use AdSubtract, and this scenario doesn't sound right to me. I've never had a page not load because of AdSubtract. Must say, I have had a crash or two, but was never able to pin them directly to AdSubtract. My guess is, there's something else going on to cause the error page. Maybe one of the computer gurus on AW can speculate.
As a seller, I'm not going to worry at all about this. If I did want to work around the situation you describe, I would store the PayPal logo on my ISP, with my other images, rather than PayPal's site. I do this with Auction User's logo so that my auction ad loading doesn't depend on them not having any problems.
posted on July 6, 2001 12:18:15 PM new
I think whatever is happening has to do with the fact when you link to PayPal for the logo and someone tries to open the page, what you are actually doing is opening the link *from* the PayPal site. In doing this you are not just opening a linked image from the PayPal site, you are essentially opening a PayPal page, and PayPal sends a cookie. I am not sure if PayPal has an embedded bot or bug in the logo to work in conjunction with the cookie. But I strongly suspect that whatever is in the logo, it tells the cookie to call home to PayPal. I suspect this so strongly because AdSubtract reads the code in the logo and deflects it because it thinks it is an ad, and most ads have tracking bots and bugs. So when AdSubtract deflects the logo, and you have your browser set to accept cookies, it causes a conflict, and the eBay page hangs, or doesn't load because it can't open the linked page from PayPal. It seems you either have to accept both the logo and the cookie, or reject them both to get the eBay page to load.
I found a bunch of Paypal cookies on the session rejected list of my cookie cruncher program. I couldn't figure out where they came from since I wasn't anywhere near the Paypal site. I looked at AdSubtract and saw that it had rejected ads(logos) from Paypal. So I cleared both lists and went to an auction that I knew had a linked Paypal logo and sure enough, there was a deflected ad and a cookie. The PayPal cookie is called "stronghold".
You can set AdSubtract to reject cookies as well as ads. I think if you reject the PayPal cookie along with the ad(logo) the page will load.
I am not going to get off on the tangent as to *why* PayPal is tracking from a linked logo, or what information they are trying to collect. Actually I don't know whey anyone would want a linked logo of any kind on their auctions. All links slow down page loading. Plus it isn't just PayPal that sends cookies with links to other sites. I have found rejected cookies from Photopoint, Ruby Lane, Auctionwatch, and a number of other sites when I have opened auction pages with links, and even when you use counters from other sites they send cookies too.
