comic=red x

[Lilly]

I was shooed over here from the comics thread.

I'm seeing red x boxes for all of the comics. It's just the actual comic image, everything else on the site is working perfectly normally. I have Norton Personal firewall, and when I temporally disable it and refresh, the comics show up normally. I'm using Avant Browser (IE 6.0) and it does the same thing in normal IE. And it dosen't work using Firefox 0.9.3 either.

[phlip]

I get the same thing.

Right-click Norton in the tray and click "Norton Personal Firewall", then click on Privacy control, click Configure then Advanced, and set "Information about visited sites" to Permit.

Chances are that the server's set up so it only serves out the comics to people who view them through this site, but not from elsewhere - and if NPF blocks the referrer header then it can't tell and rejects it. (Most anti-hotlinking code on sites will allow the download if there's no referrer info at all... hint hint ;))

[YawningAngel]

Internet Explorer 6.0.2900.2180
WinXP pro SP2
Windows firewall on or off

Also sat behind a Watchguard Firewall 700, any help on what needs allowing would be greatly appreciated
:)

[SumGuy]

Symantec Client Firewall, not sure the version
Windows XP Pro SP2

when I turn off Symantec, comic turns ok again.

[RawBearNYC]

Sorry folks.

We've got a new issue with our new web host. Rich wasn't paying bandwidth to me, but he is restricted at the new host. Right now, he's got some room, but we expect some real growth in the short term. I'm finding quite a few places where people have remote linked strips (in one case and RSS feed that remote links the last 25 strips or so). This will seriously eat up our bandwidth as the Order of the Stick image files are the most popular thing on this site. And if those remote sites get thousands of hits. If we're gonna get those hits, we want people to see this site.

Rich and I need to have a long talk about what to do if no "referrer" data is provided due to firewall issues, but I'm leaving it as is for now. I did a quick google on the term "norton personal firewall block referrer" and found this page: http://www.casa.gov.au/tools/ors_nis.htm

Those of you with NPF should set it up to allow the referrer information to be sent to www.giantitp.com (or giantitp.com if you're too lazy to type the www, but remember, it has to be the same as the site you visit -- or just do both).

I'll look into the other firewalls. Bear with us.

[Lilly]

I did nothing between last night and now, and I can suddenly see the comic. But I went ahead and fiddled with my firewall and it works fine. Thank you.

[RawBearNYC]

I still need to talk to Rich, but I enabled, for the moment, blank referrers. It's a question of how mad at remote linkers I get versus how much I want to alienate viewers. (of course, it's really a case of how much HE wants to do these things, so that's why I wanna talk to him).

[YawningAngel]

Yep, fixed here too. Thanks for sorting it ;D