One of the major battles I've been involved with over the course of the last year is trying to get important station site content past Norton Internet Security. It seems that the default settings for Norton (which covers about 99% of its users) include the automatic blocking of various page elements that it considers advertising or ad-like or has the potential to be used as ads or perhaps in the presence of a full moon might become an ad. I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't have to. They're Norton.
...Norton blocks document writes from outside sources...
Norton's answer to ad blocking is to make sure it never even reaches your browser. Brilliant, right? The problem is that they went for the easiest solution at the expense of blocking loads of valid content. They block images of specific ad-like or banner-like sizes (thus killing various logos and program highlights) or with certain keywords like "ad" or "sponsor." (I had to change the name of one of my image subfolders from "/sponsors/" to "/underwriters/".) These problems were fairly easy to bypass and work around, but that's not the worst of it...
Norton blocks document writes from outside sources.
...it expunges the content directly from the source code before it ever reaches a user's browser...
You're probably wondering why I wrote that last sentence as if it should be accompanied by ominous background music. The answer is that PBS uses just such outside document writes to provide some very important content to station websites. The program search function that allows users to search through the upcoming program schedules by keyword, title, or subject as well as the TeacherSource Activity Search function that allows teachers to search for lesson plans, classroom activities, and games tied to local programming are both blocked by Norton. Again, that's not the worst of it...
The worst problem with Norton Internet Security is that it expunges the content directly from the source code before it ever reaches a user's browser. [That's MY code. I'm an anal coder. Don't ever do that.] That means that users with this software installed see my pages with no content, missing content, or outright holes in the pages as if I had no idea what I was doing in creating that page. Norton leaves it that way, too. They don't take credit for helping to save that user from my horrible attempt to educate them. Heck no, they like to hide out in the system tray all unobtrusive as if they were just minding their own business and had no clue what was going on.
...users with this software installed see my pages with missing content...
If this were some low-end, hardly-used software with a handful of users, I wouldn't care. But this is Norton, and, depending on whose statistics you believe, it's currently shipping preinstalled with all its preset defaults on something between 50% and 80% of all new, store-bought computers. That's a major chunk of my current and future users. How many schools does that include?
The most important content, the one thing that I believe transforms a local public television station website from a glorified brochure into a major educational resource is the ability to deliver already-finished, professionally-developed lesson plans and classroom activities to the busy local teachers and homeschoolers who need them most. That's what Norton's ad hoc approach to ad blocking is preventing, not advertising, just valid content. I can slip an advertisement through Norton without any problem.
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