WTH: Opera + advertising site = login prompt

F

fonz

The strangest thing happened the other day: I was visiting a site that I use a lot and one of the ads (it's a free service so I can't really complain about the odd ad banner) started causing a login prompt for http://www.traveladvertising.com on every page view. I had to click cancel three consecutive times before the page would display. After a couple of days I unintentionally shut Opera down (I probably accidentally hit some kind of key combo) and once I restarted Opera the login prompts no longer appeared.

Any idea what this could be? There could be something wrong with the advertiser's server (after all, seriously, a login prompt???) but nobody else on this very busy site reported the same problem, the prompts didn't appear when I fired up my laptop (also with FreeBSD and Opera) and when I restarted Opera (which had been running for a long time) the login prompts no longer appeared.

Fonz
 
Sounds like a temp glitch to me. Maybe they were restarting some database front-end, or a reverse proxy, or they botched a firewall redirect rule temporarily dropping you in some abandoned .htaccess-protected directory. Or they switched the client ad-serving site with a password-protected vendor/partner channel site by messing up the virtual hosts and DocumentRoot settings after an office party. It's a miracle it doesn't happen more often when I read this!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top