I like it when my code works. Most developers do. What I don’t like is when code I KNOW works all of a sudden STOPS working. I spent a good 3 hours ripping my hair out trying to figure out why all of a sudden UrlReferrer was always null in my ASP.NET application. A week ago, my code worked great. Today it doesn’t. I did a lot of digging, asked a couple questions on the ASP.NET forum, but no luck. Then today, I stumbled upon this thread. Could this be? A third part application, one I use to protect my development machine, be hosing my app? Turns out it was. Calling the same code from my MacBook worked as expected.
So what happened? I think a NAV virus definition update changed how the headers appear in HTTP requests from my machine, as stated in the article. I realize we depend on these third party virus protection software applications to protect us from malicious software and the like, but this is crazy. At least tell me you’re doing it and then give me an EASY way to turn it off.
Another interesting implication of this, that was briefly touched on in the above mentioned thread is, would this affect statistics capturing software? Would the stats in Google Analytics be skewed? My guess is yeah, to some degree they will be if header information is held back. What are other people’s thoughts on this?
Precisely why I don’t have any virus protection on my home system, especially not a memory hog like any of Norton’s products. It’s unfortunate that Norton’s Antivirus now does this as my previous experience with this intrusive (default) feature has been through Systemworks and Internet Security.
I have assisted many users with this exact problem. Hiding or preventing the passing of the referring URL causes more problems than protections. Since it seems Norton Antivirus is suddenly doing this by default, without user intervention, will you pursue coding a fallback method or otherwise changing your code to handle this problem?
Yeah, its on my radar to take care of for sure. My code doesn’t break perse, but it just doesn’t notify a user when it should (adding an item to their cart). I’ll probably just have to resort to something different like putting a query string value on the url or something. I’m just glad I was able to figure it out before I tore my applicationa part thinking that it was broken.