Adtools

Problem: In the getURL() function of most ads (the actionscript used to manage people clicking the advert) we noticed recently that for some reason they all failed except for _blank. Luckily I managed to find this post:
http://www.kirupa.com/forum/showthread.php?t=296448

I’ll paraphrase the poster here who explains it best:

That’s because the security model changed from Flash 8 onwards. Basically, you need to set the flash parameter “allowScriptAccess” to “always” in your HTML.
If you check the help files for getURL, you’ll see it explained:

1. When allowScriptAccess is “never”, outbound scripting always fails.
2. When allowScriptAccess is “always”, outbound scripting always succeeds.
3. When allowScriptAccess is “sameDomain” (supported by SWF files starting with version 8 ), outbound scripting is allowed if the SWF file is from the same domain as the hosting web page.
4. If allowScriptAccess is not specified by an HTML page, the default value is “sameDomain” for version 8 SWF files, and the default value is “always” for earlier version SWF files.

The section on Understanding Security also makes it clear that you can’t transfer data between secure and non-secure servers:
“In addition, content that is loaded through non-secure (non-HTTPS) protocols cannot read content loaded through a secure (HTTPS) protocol, even when both are in exactly the same domain.”

You’ll probably need to create a cross-domain policy to get round the security restriction. Again, that’s covered in the Help files.

OK, so we checked our Flash templates as supplied by Doubleclick and discovered that as default they set the allowScriptAccess to “never”. Now we now why they weren’t clicking through properly Anyway, some amendments to the templates and an update to the back-end admanager system and we’ve got fully functional flash ads back again.

Crucially though, don’t forget to amend you OBJECT tag properties and the EMBED tag properties otherwise this will fail on Firefox et al… I’ve built some flash units and amended their click targets so you can see this below, due to the limitations of WordPress I can;t embed these and have to put them on a different page:

Example list of adverts with varying click targets and allowScripStatus