Re: 404 redirects "stolen" by provider

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On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 21:29 +0200, Merlin Morgenstern wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> I am running a website under apache and php where I do redirects on 404 
> errors:
> 
> apache conf:
> ErrorDocument 404 /subapp_members/search_user.php
> 
> This is done to allow ULRs with usernames like this:
> www.server.com/username
> 
> The PHP script search_user.php looks in a db if the user name is 
> existent and if yes shows his member page. If the name is not existent 
> it displays an internal 404 message.
> 
> This worked perfectly for recent years until now. Some users complain 
> that they do see advertisement instead of the page. A research showed 
> that they are using a provider called "unitymedia". As soon as a site 
> has a page not found error it redirects them to their own advertisement 
> page. This is true for all pages on the net. e.b. ebay.com/testing shows 
> their advertisement.
> 
> Has somebody an idea on how to fix that from my site?
> 
> Thank you for any help,
> 
> Merlin
> 


It looks like the ISP is looking at the header response codes and
capturing the 404 ones. I've seen other ISP's do this and return a
search results page of their own sponsored content.

I think the best way round this is to use the .htaccess redirect rules
instead to deliver the correct content:

RewriteRule ^(.+) /users.php?username=$1

Of course that's only a simple example, and you might need to tweak it a
bit.

This way, no extra header codes are sent to the user, and can't be
captured by anyones ISP.

Thanks,
Ash
http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk



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