Links through Google do not trigger Splashify [#1982374]

I experienced this problem:

1. basically Splashify works, on every page, redirecting to another page
2. it works if I type the URL to my site in the browser (no referrer)
3. it works if I link to my site from another site (referrer = external)
4. it DOESN'T work if I follow a link to my site through Google !!!

After some debugging I found the reason: the URL that Google generates (which splashify sees as the referrer) roughly has the form of:
http://www.google.com/?[blahblah-google-querystring]&url=http%3A%2F%2Fww...

So the problem is that the function function "i.search(s)", which tests if the referrer contains the site-URL, returns true.
For now I have solved this by trimming the referrer. I have added this bit of code right after the referrer is put in a variable (i):

i = i.substr(0,i.indexOf("?"));

This cuts off anything after (and including) the question mark, which marks the beginning of the querystring.

Comments

Comment #1

Vidioterie CreditAttribution: Vidioterie commented 29 April 2013 at 11:59

Oops, code above breaks functionality by showing splash-page on every click within the site itself, because there's no check if there's actually a "?" in the code, so if not, it doesn't recognize the referrer at all, because de substr(0,-1) doesn't return anything.
Here's the corrected code (in sites/all/modules/splashify/js/splashify_init_min.js):

(right after: var i=document.referrer+"";)

if(i.indexOf("?")!=-1) { i = i.substr(0,i.indexOf("?")) }

Comment #2

chrisroane CreditAttribution: chrisroane commented 14 September 2013 at 15:25

Status:

Active

» Needs review

Good catch! I took your code and modified it to work with the JS, and I think this should be fixed.

Do you have a way of testing this from your end? This updated code is in the 7.x-1.x dev branch. I'm pretty sure this should now be fixed, but it would be great if you could test this from your end.

Sorry for the late response. I'm just getting caught up with the issue queue.

Comment #3

chrisroane CreditAttribution: chrisroane commented 21 September 2013 at 16:07

Status:

Needs review

» Closed (fixed)

I pushed this changes into the next release of the module: 7.x-1.1. It should show up on the download page soon.

Comment #3.0

chrisroane CreditAttribution: chrisroane commented 21 September 2013 at 16:07

Issue summary:

View changes

added code-tag around little code bit

Comment #4

dpearcefl CreditAttribution: dpearcefl commented 20 November 2013 at 21:04

Version:	7.x-1.0	» 7.x-1.x-dev
Issue summary:	View changes
Status:	Closed (fixed)	» Active

I'm using the dev code and this issue still happens for me. If I am coming from google, I get html but it renders to a blank white page. If I copy the url into a new browser, it works correctly.

Comment #5

dpearcefl CreditAttribution: dpearcefl commented 2 December 2013 at 14:38

Is there any news about getting this fixed?

Comment #6

chrisroane CreditAttribution: chrisroane commented 2 December 2013 at 14:45

From my testing, it looked like it was working. But I don't have a real case to test with.

I haven't been able to look into this again yet, and the next few weeks look pretty busy for me. There is a chance I may have some time next week to look into it. I'll try to fit it in then.

If you know PHP/JS code, you are sure welcome to take a look. Especially if you have a site where you can replicate this problem.

Comment #7

rwinikates CreditAttribution: rwinikates commented 2 December 2013 at 16:58

I am having a hard time reproducing in Chrome on either Mac or Windows, but Firefox (win/mac) and Safari (mac) can reproduce it. Console error shows the following:
ReferenceError: i is not defined @/sites/all/modules/splashify/js/splashify_init_min.js

Comment #8

rwinikates CreditAttribution: rwinikates commented 2 December 2013 at 17:08

Furthermore it seems to only affect redirects, not modal windows through colorbox.

Comment #9

chrisroane CreditAttribution: chrisroane commented 2 December 2013 at 17:11

Ah, that might explain why it worked fine for me in Chrome.

Comment #10

paulkittredge CreditAttribution: paulkittredge commented 2 December 2013 at 17:28

I can replicate this problem in Safari on OSX. Here's what I did:

Put Safari in Private Browsing mode (Safari >> Private Browsing)
Visit https://www.google.com
Search for "Moving MD Forward"
Click on the first result that pops up - that should bring you to www.movingmdforward.net. Notice that you get the home page without a splash redirect.
In a new tab, visit http://www.movingmdforward.net. Notice that you now get the splash page redirect.

For what it's worth, this is using Splashify version 7.x-1.0 - one version ago. I'm comfortable sharing this URL, since it's degrading somewhat gracefully (showing the home page instead of the splash page, but giving a white screen). I do have another site where I can replicate the issue the original poster mentioned, where the site is on 7.x-1.1 - but I'm not comfortable publicly sharing the URL. Please let me know if you'd like me to pass that along to you, so you can replicate it there.

I mention this in case it's helpful comparing 1.0 to 1.1 and seeing how the changes from 1.0 to 1.1 created the white screen.

Comment #11

Nicolas Bouteille CreditAttribution: Nicolas Bouteille commented 16 December 2013 at 00:51

I suspect this could come from Google itself. I have enabled the module on a website that has been live for less than a month and suddenly I get the white screen. I have been forced to disable the splash page for now.

Read this https://drupal.org/node/2104817

What do you guys think ?

Comment #12

chrisroane CreditAttribution: chrisroane commented 21 December 2013 at 18:20

Priority:	Normal	» Critical
Status:	Active	» Needs review

Thanks everyone for the help in tracking this down!

So I took another look at it and did more testing and found the JS error that was happening. It was actually triggering the JS error in all browsers because there was a bug in the JS. That should now be fixed in the latest code in the dev branch.

Before I push this to 1.2, can someone test the dev branch to see if this problem is resolved? One way that I tested it was manually change the referrer JS variable to use what Vidioterie included above, which will trigger the code we are firing when the link comes from Google.

Nicolas Bouteille: I haven't confirmed if Google is also preventing this from working as well because I don't have a real world example. But the fact that the page is loading a blank page infers that this problem was caused by the JS error that I fixed above. So I'm fairly confident this should fix this issue.