Hello,
First can I want to say a big thank you to all the XOOPS developers out there. It's no exaggeration to say it has truly improved my working life!

Having been a hit a few times by the Norton and friends firewall blocking referrers and disallowing registrations problem. I decided to add an emailadmin function to the insertUser call in the register.php file to see how many times my users are getting this problem.

Background: I'm running a popular local non tech site for some friends in a very non tech city. So although there is a client side workaround available on this XOOPS site, it's not much use as these people don't take kindly to being told to reconfigure their firewalls!

I started seeing the problem in September and since then the problem has gradually ramped up to nearly one in every two attempts to register today.

I have changed the error message to let the people know what to do and offered a telephone number, but generally people just leave the site.

I was wondering if anybody out there had a server side work around for this problem. I can only see it getting more prevalent as people purchase new machines with copies of NIS 2004 installed.

I am going to continue to look into the problem myself, but it seems the use of referrers is throughout Xoops...

I'm really posting this entry to see if anybody else has attempted to tackle this problem..

Please let us know!

Thanks

Kolley.

I have the same problem...people with firewall turn on cant register or send news...

It is of course possible to hack XOOPS to not check the HTTP referrer, if that is what you really want...

But how?

include/common.php

Comment out lines 61-63 and 65, so they look like this:

Will this bring any kind of problem in the future?

Thanks for your quick reply.

Is it really that simple??

What would we lose by losing the ability to use referrers?

Blocking the referrers makes your site prone to Cross-Site Scripting attacks, as mentioned in this thread.
Just posted on coming to a more descriptive error message on the same HTTP_REFERER blocking issue in this thead.
Eric