Cant order unless firewall disabled

[briansowter]

Our site www.sowter.co.uk generally works well but every few days we get a customer who cant order because the credit card screen does not appear or some other problem like the basket is always empty. I have tested the site and it is always perfect with my hardware CIX firewall but if I use a machine with Norton Firewall on it I get the same problem and cannot order. Also the graphics do not appear.

Is this a problem at my service provider? Or is ther somthig I can tell the customer to do apart fom disablig th firewall.

Thanks for your help
Brian

[I-CC]

First of all, are you on the very last patch for v5, being 5.1.6 http://www.actinic.co.uk/support/downloads.htm

However, firewalls are moving with the times in making it more difficult for undesirables to get into your computers when connected for such long periods of time, or indefinate connections when on ADSL, which Actinic attempts to work with as these new adoptions come along, hense you will see versions that are adapted to overcome the most common problems encountered by those using the likes of Norton, but v5 is sometime back, so the latest blocking moves by Norton will not be in that, infact some of the oldest blocks will not be covered by the software, so to keep up with the firewalls being changed, you are probably going to have to move to a newer version of the software to be in the best position of overcoming the most common blocks etc.

I know that the first scream that will come from this is 'why should we pay for an upgrade when it is not our fault' etc etc and that Actinic should provide a minor version upgrade to combat this under v5. But, this is not Actinics fault either and they can not produce minor versions indefinately for a software title which was off mainstream so long ago and I do recall them building the last patch for v5.1.6 some time after v6 was in operation to overcome problems back then, likewise they have produced the last patch for v6 after v7 was launched, so they do their bit in that respect.

Sad fact is. The internet has plenty of hackers wanting to get into your machines, so as people buy the latest software to protect themselves, they also to some degrees prevent themselves from using every feature of a site due to its automatic implementation of features, for which the dreaded XP Service Pack 2 was a great example of this, virtually wiping out peoples access to carts and ecommerce sites in a couple of days of XP machines automatically downloading it and actioning its functions, so as the end site visitors update there protection means being as close as possible behind in upgrades of the software running your site.

All of that said, there are sites out there running v3 and v4 and they do ok, but it is a case they will be missing orders due to firewalls and the like...

It is dog eat dog out there and the preditor dogs are getting mean, which means the likes of Norton have to get meaner in protection, which affects everything we do on the Internet to one degree or another...

Wow - I feel like a Sunday morning vicar LOL - sorry for that, but thats how it is I am afraid....

[briansowter]

Cant order unless firewall disabled

Thanks for this.

This is the "state of the industry".... no problem. We must be grateful that a company like the one I work for can do this kind of thing at all. We all get very frustrated but the internet and the PC must rank as a miracle by any standards.

I have 5.1.6.0.0.33 CNNA. I would appreciate your recommendation as to what to buy to improve matters. Should we move to V7 or V8 or can we buy maintenance package or what?

Thanks again
Brian

[Mike Hughes]

Actinic 'cover' is the maintenance package that gives you telephone support and free upgrades during the period of the cover.

So if, for example, you bought 'cover' today then you'd get an upgrade to V7 and an upgrade to V8 if it's released during the next 12 months (or for as long as you subscribe to 'cover').

Mike

[I-CC]

Actinic Cover for Catalog/Business is the way forward if you want to move to the next version, and most resellers will be able to provide that facility for you.

Further to the issue on Firewalls and whether the latest version will stave off these problems, that will not be the case, as all it will take is another change in the way that Norton (as an example of the most popular firewall) works and for that to appear automatically in hundreds of thousands of PC via its auto-update, for it to cause another heap of issues for online concerns.

Going back to when XP provided its Service Pack2 (SP2), we had hundreds of people calling and emailing our support saying that our servers were down and non functional because they could not update or download from there sites using Actinic, which we quickly found was nothing to do with the servers, but actions conducted by this SP2 making changes to their PCs and in many cases totally affecting their Norton security settings, thus blocking things which worked before. You will find references to that within this forum if you do a search for the service pack 2, and how many people ended up reverting to previous good operable states of there systems to get them working again. Now, no one asked MS to ditch there connections, but because most of these things are automatic and with most Actinic site operators pretty canny or gaining extra understanding of OS's and the Internet, they have the ability to dig deeper within themselves to get it working, whereas the general internet surfer just surfs, and just because a web page turns up blank when they click on a link within a site, does not mean that there machine blocked it, just that the site is badly written, which in most cases could not be further from the truth, with that truth being they have given away most control of what is ok and what is not ok to the likes of these commercial firewalls and do not actually realise it in most cases, whereas those on here who have been doing the Actinic or Internet thing for a while, know to look deeper.

Anyway, as you have probably gathered I hate commercial off the shelf Firewalls because of the auto update and unintelligent manner in which they want to operate, so sorry for the speech, but they really do get on my nerves sometimes, and whereas most are paranoid with Privacy of information on the net, which is not a concern I harbour that much, I am paranoid about Firewalls doing what they want and taking away the rights of people to do what they want on the Internet due to an update they did not know occured, because the changes adopted for them on these firewalls upon installation or update is not really made clear to them, or during the setup they clicked Auto and just update and protect me as required.

It is a battle of good against evil, with the Lord of the Rings hammering at our virtual Doors across our ADSL links, only to deploy little Shire Folk to protect us, that mean well, but hey, are they really upto it 'we thinks as we look down upon them'

[briansowter]

Cant order unless firewall disabled

What i need to know is....If I buy cover and upgrade to V7 to what extent will this improve the firewall problem if at all? Has Actinic added more "anti-firewall" feaures to V7 and V8?

Brian

[Nadeem]

Hi there

We had introduced a new cart handling system with version 6 and version 7, by introducing a session files which interacts with a cookie. Looking at your site, the credit cards payment is a java applet, so i am wondering if your version of Norton is disabling java applets and java scripts.

There was an issue with Norton in version 6, which was, when a client added to cart, then they would bounce back to the http://www.domain.com/acatalog/ folder, as the firewall was stripping out the referrer information. This has been fixed in version 6.1.4.

If we have found any other issue, similar to a firewall software stripping out information, then we will updated our software accordingly, but this will only be done for version 7, and possibly version 6 depending on how severe the bug is.

Kind Regards