Okay, the title is a little dramatic. This new change at EPN hasn’t as adversely affected everyone else as it has me (as far as I know). But it did make my daily clicks drop by like 200%. I will now tell you why, on the off chance you have the same problem.

A while ago, I made a post containing some tips and tricks to customize PhpBay, which is a fantastic wordpress plugin used to display eBay results that you should already have. In that post, I mentioned editing templates.ebay.results.html to make your entire listing results clickable (not just the title or title/image, but the whole shabang). I am making this post on the outside chance that either you made/found a similar code, or by the grace of God you got the code from this very site, making me personally responsible for your misfortune.

I can’t even remember where I got that code. I think I may have stole it from Radio, creator of Auction2Post. If it wasn’t him, I have a feeling whoever it was is going to remind me soon! Anyway, it worked great for a long time.

Then one day I get an email from Wade over at PhpBay telling me that Ebay has decided they don’t want affiliates using 302 redirects on their sites anymore. PhpBay was using 302 redirects by default. Why did Ebay make this seemingly trivial request? Well, apparently some affiliates were having their 302 redirect links indexed with Ebay’s content on search engines. In other words, a user executes a search query on Google, sees a result they like with a URL that points to your site, but when they click it, they are just forwarding (through an aff link) to that result on Ebay. Ebay didn’t like this. And unless you own Google, you are basically dropping rover links on a 3rd party site, and that is a no-no.

Okay, so Ebay wants 301 redirects. This will tell the search engines that the content found on the other side of that affiliate link belongs to Ebay. Fine with me. Being the upstanding and incredibly quick working man that he is, Wade over at PhpBay quickly investigated what changes needed to be made to the plugin in order to adhere to these new terms.

It ended up being a very small change to one file, the file known as auction.php that sits in whatever directory you happened to install WordPress. I opened a beer and began updating every single one of my sites. I then played TF2 and fell asleep peacefully around 7am.

OMG Where Are My Clickz!?
The next few days my EPN dashboard graph thingy looked like the world’s tallest and simplest roller coaster. Needless to say, I was alarmed. I quickly began creating EPN conspiracy theories in my mind (and on message boards).

I feel like this story is getting long-winded and dramatic so I’m just gonna cut to the chase:

IE will NOT pass the referring URL to a new window with Javascript!

Freaking Internet Explorer. And as we all know, the masses still use the browser that was conveniently pre-loaded for them on their PC. If you navigated to my old post which contains the modified template.ebay.results.html code, you will see something like:

added in there. This was the culprit. Only non-IE visitors were managing to click from my site to eBay. People using IE would click a result, then be taken to a blank page on my site where they would scratch their heads and then immediately forget my site ever existed.

Solution
Since I’m just a retard that steals other people’s code and can barely make a blog post, I had no idea what the hell to do. Luckily, my coding wizard friend Ryan looked into it for me and found an extremely simple solution to fix this.

Follow these super duper easy steps:

1. Open up the new Auction.php file in your favorite text editor (Notepad2 is a good one)
2. Scroll down to line 35, and find the string: $referer_approved = false;
3. Simply change “false” to “true” (without the quotes, duh!)

And like magic, the javascript links will work again.

Will eBay Care?
How in the heck should I know? If anyone at the eBay Partner Network is reading this, please feel free to respond. Also, did I ever tell you how beautiful you are?

Hey Wait a Second, Why do you Need that Javascript Crappola Anyway?
Well, that’s a valid question. I guess I don’t, really. But I really like making the entire listing clickable. I also like the fact that when a user hovers over the link it doesn’t show the URL at the bottom of their browser. I’m not ready to part with those two things, as I feel they improve the performance of the majority of my sites. I am also fantastically stubborn and didn’t want to revert to “default”.

My birthday is tomorrow, so I’m gonna start drinking now. Bye!