Re: 404 redirects "stolen" by provider

On Fri, 2010-04-09 at 21:29 +0200, Merlin Morgenstern wrote: > Hello, > > I am running a website under apache and php where I do redirects on 404 > errors: > > apache conf: > ErrorDocument 404 /subapp_members/search_user.php > > This is done to allow ULRs with usernames like this: > www.server.com/username > > The PHP script search_user.php looks in a db if the user name is > existent and if yes shows his member page. If the name is not existent > it displays an internal 404 message. > > This worked perfectly for recent years until now. Some users complain > that they do see advertisement instead of the page. A research showed > that they are using a provider called "unitymedia". As soon as a site > has a page not found error it redirects them to their own advertisement > page. This is true for all pages on the net. e.b. ebay.com/testing shows > their advertisement. > > Has somebody an idea on how to fix that from my site? > > Thank you for any help, > > Merlin > It looks like the ISP is looking at the header response codes and capturing the 404 ones. I've seen other ISP's do this and return a search results page of their own sponsored content. I think the best way round this is to use the .htaccess redirect rules instead to deliver the correct content: RewriteRule ^(.+) /users.php?username=$1 Of course that's only a simple example, and you might need to tweak it a bit. This way, no extra header codes are sent to the user, and can't be captured by anyones ISP. Thanks, Ash http://www.ashleysheridan.co.uk