Adblocking Demonstration

This page is designed to show what happens when Norton Internet Security edits a webpage. The table below contains a number of test cases using Ebay affiliate links through the Commission Junction network. There are three groups of links, with various edits made to the link to test what NIS is looking for.

Of course if you already have adblocking software installed, you're not going to see this page as it was designed. You should see three tables, each with four links. The first two are banners and the third is text links.

Banner Links

Banner Link - Standard CJ link		Norton will find the qksrv.net domains in both the banner and click URLs. It will also detect the image width and height coded in the img tag (468x60, a standard banner size). This link will be blocked.
Banner Link with Ad url changed		This link has the ad banner masked through a local redirect. However, NIS will still detect the image width/height as well as the click URL. This image will be blocked.
Banner Link with Click URL changed		This link has the click URL masked through a local redirect, however, the IMG url as well as the img size will cause it to be blocked by NIS. This link will be blocked.
Banner Link with ad URL and click URL changed		This link has both the banner and img links masked through a local redirect. However, this link will still be blocked because of the image width and height coded in the IMG tag. This link will be blocked.

Banner Links with no width and height

The following four banner links are identical to the above except they have had the width=468 and height=60 removed from the image tags.

Banner Link, no width/height		This s a standard link only with the width and height removed from the img tag. This will be blocked because the img and link urls are qksrv.net.
Banner Link with Ad url changed no width/height		This link has the width/height removed and the ad URL masked. This will be blocked because the link URL is qksrv.net and on the NIS block list.
Banner Link with Click URL changed, no width/height		Again, width/height removed with the click URL masked. The img url being qksrv.net will get this link blocked.
Banner Link with ad URL and click URL changed, no width/height		With all of the ad-identifying things removed, width/height, and all traces of qksrv.net, this link will not be blocked.

Text Links

These links are plain text links, without an image tag. These links, being Commission Junction tags, do have the 1x1 tracking pixel. Banner links do not have this tracking tag as the image itself serves as the impression tag.

Text Link - standard CJ text link		This tag has a qksrv.net in the impression and click. Both the impression tag and the text link will be blocked because they contain qksrv.net.
Text Link with click url only changed	www.ebay.com	This link has the click URL masked. Therefore, the text link will not get blocked. Examining the page source reveals that the 1x1 pixel is blocked because it is a qksrv.net link.
Text Link with 1x1 URL only changed		In this case, like the first, the text link will be blocked because it is a qksrv.net link. The tracking pixel is not blocked indicating that NIS does not target 1x1 pixels specifically.
Text Link with both 1x1 and click url changed	www.ebay.com	With qksrv.net removed in these masked URLs, both the click url and the impression tag remain intact.

Based on these tests, it's clear that the bolded items below will cause the tag to be blocked:

<a href="http://www.qksrv.net/click-1239111-5377629" target="_top" > <img src="http://www.qksrv.net/image-1239111-5377629" width="468" height="60" alt="Sell your item on eBay!" border="0">

So what? These are Ads!

You might ask, what's the big deal? These are ads. Users don't want to view them. Fine, but consider this sort of content that a website owner has designed on a shopping site. If a user is viewing a site with this content, you can't so easily argue that they don't want to view this content. And when it's blocked, there's no indicatation from NIS what happened. It just looks like a broken website.

Congratulations for getting this far. Now for the punchline. Take a good look at this page and click here to view what this page looks like with Norton Internet Security's default settings.

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