[fp] Donations through mysportsrelief.com appear blocked

[Verulam]

I was just trying to make a charity donation using this link:
http://www.mysportrelief.com/personalPa ... Pref=en-CA

I've got Adblock Plus 1.1.3 and NoScript installed, and the problem (below) was encountered even with NoScript set to allow all scripts.

When making a donation via the link above and using PayPal as the payment method, I get to a "Confirm your payment" screen and clicked on the "Complete Payment" button (which should take me to PayPal to authorise the transaction) but got a session time-out message (not the error page which displays here: https://secure.mysportrelief.com/regist ... ref=en-CA)

Using exactly the same URL (top) in IE, I was able to make the donation, and the key difference that I noticed was that after clicking the "Complete Payment" button I authorised a pop-up in IE which then resulted in redirection to PayPal.

In fact, doing a repeat transaction in Firefox (try it yourself - no actual donation is made until you have authorised the transaction on PayPal) but with Adblock Plus disabled, the "session time-out" message did not appear, and I was forwarded to PayPal to authorise the payment.

So it appears to be an Adblock Plus issue, possibly the blocking of the pop-up.

mysportsrelief.com takes an awful lot of charity donations in the UK and so a fix for this would probably be rather good.

TIA.

[Hubird]

I was able to reproduce and find a fix for the problem although I am not very happy with it.

The site seems to only work if utm.gif is allowed to load. This gif is part of google-analytics and is used for tracking purposes. The amount of information sent by allowing this makes me angry but unfortunately this is the only way to get this particular site to work.

For what it's worth I will be sending a letter to the webmaster hopefully you will do the same.


If you are using Fanboy's subscriptions it should be fixed now.

[Erunno]

Is there any way to reproduce this problem *without* actually making a donation?

[Wladimir Palant]

Erunno - yes, you enter bogus information (make sure to change the country, then it won't validate your postcode).

[Wladimir Palant]

From what I can tell, this site is simply failing intermittently - even if Adblock Plus is disabled. This doesn't seem to be related to __utm.gif at all, simply some server-side issues. Going back and resubmitting the form usually "fixes" the issue.

[Hubird]

This doesn't seem to be related to __utm.gif at all, simply some server-side issues.

I guess I should have done more testing...Looks like you are correct, I was able to get to the paypal log in screen with utm.gif blocked (thought it was a bit weird).

I've removed the whitelist.