[Blackpool] Missing Pinterest Button saga....

[Elizabeth C]

Hi All

Because I'm going away tonight I asked a fellow eBid chap (Ian) to have a look at this problem.

He has posted his results on Forum so I will append them here in case anyone might find it interesting.....

Just for information:  my user name on eBid is Cheaver and a PM is a Private Message capable of being sent to members via the eBid Forum. The "whole lot of missing Forum Buttons" means there should be at least 6 of them! eg Facebook; Twitter; Stumbleupon; Tumblr etc etc so all were missing, not just the Pinterest button.

Elizabeth (aka cheaver!)

Ian's efforts:

Well I was doing some research on this and have a few ideas in mind.



First of all I have the missing Pinterest thing here and not in my Ebid. I use Chrome, so this is not Firefox specific



It does suggest something external to eBid.



Cheaver has a machine which loses the button at home but not when at her
 UG. The difference here will  be the ISP, I assume this temporarily.



Now, Cheaver has another machine with identical OS etc which is totally 
unaffected using the same setup. She uses Firefox on both machines. I 
must assume that it both cases it is the same version of Firefox  in all respects.



I ran a test on a laptop which normally runs W7 with a twin core Intel 
processor , 500 Gb HD and 4Gb ram - a fairly standard setup. Under 
Chrome I get the correct buttons in my ebid and am missing Pinterest in 
these forums. Using the USB OS trick I've mentioned before, I booted 
into a very high security version of a Linux system with a special high 
security browser. Logging into eBid I could see the buttons in my Ebid, 
and I could have used them. However there were no buttons at all visible
 in the forums. The whole lot had gone. In fact the browser would not 
let me PM  Cheaver from within this forum. In other words the forum 
software is a high security risk. Ebid's own "face to the world" is very
 well protected.



My thoughts so far? Something has changed in the security field. 
Constant threats mean that ISP's are frequently changing their filters 
to protect both themselves and users. Some of the filters provided may 
well react slightly differently depending upon the combination of CPU, 
OS and browser involved. AV filters sometimes react differently 
according to these factors as well.



Later this evening I shall load Chrome into my very secure OS to see what happens then.



So far as I can determine the "block" is external to eBid and the forum,
 and minor variations between individual machines are to be expected. 
Although interesting and, perhaps infuriating to some members, I doubt 
if there is a universal "fix" that will preserve security. Personally I 
have not gained any eBid "brownie points" through the social media as I 
consider them to be such a security risk I have not used them as yet.