Weird ads showing up in web pages

[John J. Burke]

Jennifer,

I had the same sort of thing happen this morning with Netscape 2.0.  One of
our library pages (which we use as the home page on our public workstations)
kept coming up with parts of another (non library) page plastered over it.  I
could go anywhere else on our library page except for this particular page, and
the pages displayed fine.  After a lot of experimentation, I cleared the Memory
and Disk Caches, and the page displayed as it should.  Hope this helps!

John

John J. Burke, MSLS | Librarian | Instructor | Internet Trainer | Author
Ruth Ann Musick Library, Fairmont State College, Fairmont, WV  26554-2489
E-mail:  u536a at wvnvm.wvnet.edu | Homepage:  http://wvnvm.wvnet.edu/~u536a
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Need a textbook for your Internet training?  How about PowerPoint slides
for a presentation?  See my homepage to order _Learning the Internet:  A
Workbook for Beginners_ (Neal-Schuman, 1996) and the accompanying slides.

On 11/14/96, Jennifer McLeod wrote:
>Hello, Web4Libbers.

>Something odd has been going on here in our library.  For the past
>couple of weeks, several of our public-access PCs, as well as the PC at
>the reference desk, all of which use Netscape 3.0 to access the web,
>have begun to have strange things appear when they access our library's
>home page.

>What happens varies - icons of ads from Yahoo appear ("win a trip to
>France!"), Yahoo's banner itself appears as well, and sometimes our
>navigational buttons are rearranged or even repeated.  The ads and
>banners REPLACE the pictures we normally have on-screen.   However, when
>one clicks on one of these out-of-place images, we are taken to the
>appropriate page on our system.  (for example, the "hours" button was
>replaced by the Yahoo banner, yet when clicked on our library hours page
>was displayed.  It looks normal.)  We even had the picture of our
>library building appear twice on the page!  The strange layouts do not
>affect the links (apparently).

>After a bit of surfing, the page will load normally, but sometimes
>hitting reload doesn't reset the page.

>When the source code is revealed, the page looks perfectly okay.  I see
>no signs of weirdness on our server.

>This does not happen all the time, nor does it happen at a certain time
>every day.  Also, it hasn't happened (that I know of) on any of the
>staff-only machines (of course, people don't tell me EVERYthing.  :) ).
>It also seems to be ONLY our library's home page, not other pages.  That
>is the default "home" page on each machine.

>Help!  What could be doing this?  Major mystery!  Could the infamous
>cookies be causing images to display on pages at certain times?  (that
>is one hypothesis).  Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, mad ravings?
>All would be appreciated!


>Thank you!

>Jen McLeod
>CWIS Coordinator
>University of Maine