One for the Techies

[ett1954]

For the last couple of days whenever I list, revise or sell similar and enter an item into the description box I get the following message:  We found the following active content in your listing: Plugin. To make eBay a more secure marketplace, we hide all active content from buyers.

This is especially prevalent on copying and pasting from descriptions in my catalogues which are either Word or Notepad documents.  The Word documents have reams of additional HTML code added when pasting into the description box which I can remove manually to solve the issue, however this is time consuming.  Since the active content removal button was removed when the listing page was 'improved' there is no longer an option to remove active content automatically.

Interestingly, if I ignore the warning and proceed the listing does display as intended.  I have scanned using the eBay active content scanner on these affected listings and it shows no active content present, which contradicts the red warning.

I have done the obvious - cleared cache and cookies, switched the computer off and rebooted, changed browser (problem persists in Edge and Firefox), and checked browser extensions - the only added extension was added as a default - 'Google docs extension offline'.

The problem appears to be linked to formatting and I realise that Word can be HTML heavy however I have worked using these documents for 15 years with no issues until the last few days.  Whilst using Notepad docs although the active content warning is not given I have noticed that when copying and pasting into the description box the line break isn't automatically entered between paragraphs resulting in a solid block of text making reading difficult.  Has some change to the description box been made by eBay?  It now follows the text format that is found if using the AI description generator.

Is anyone experiencing similar issues or has anyone anyone any idea what could be causing the  problem?

[4_bathrooms]

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@ett1954 wrote:

Interestingly, if I ignore the warning and proceed the listing does display as intended.  I have scanned using the eBay active content scanner on these affected listings and it shows no active content present, which contradicts the red warning.

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It doesn't; the active content was removed before the listing was published.

Have you tried copying from Word, pasting into Notepad then copying from Notepad and pasting into the description box? Also, Notepad++ might be something worth trying rather than "regular" Notepad.

[ett1954]

@4_bathrooms   Thanks for the suggestions. I did try a copy into Notepad from Word and then copy into the description and this did work, however, it does unfortunately lose some of the clarity of key points of the description.  Will look at Notepad ++, I have never come across it before.

I don't know about the active listing being taken out when it was published.  I left the affected listings in the schedule and went back today to re-edit (remove the unnecessary HTML code )and it was still showing the warning even though the description was displayed as intended.  I can only think that the HTML that was added from wherever was superfluous to the way the description is intended to be presented.  When removing the added HTML there was a vast amount up to 10 times the amount of text in the description, mostly repetitive; line after line.

It is also still strange that the Notepad formatting which I have been using regularly has also changed in the description box.

Thanks again, I will continue to monitor and experiment.

[4_bathrooms]

As I understand it eBay allows basic HTML formatting. For example, the listing template has a "Show HTML code" option that will show the HTML formatting that will be used even if you paste pure text into the box.

My gut feeling is there might be a link to an external source that is causing the problem in the code; try searching it for "https://". You could try saving the Word document (from within Word) as a HTML document then copy and paste the contents of the HTML document into the "Description" field. 

[ett1954]

You are correct in that eBay does allow basic HTML formatting, I have always used it.  I know eBay also adds spurious HTML coding to item descriptions which is not an issue providing you occasionally remove the irrelevant coding if you are constantly editing which I do.

I copied an offending part of the document and saved as an HTML document but could find no "https://" reference; however the portion was full of spurious HTML which appears to be linked to formatting.  Fortunately all this comes in a block and I can easily find the beginning and end to remove it, which then removes the active content warning.  Unfortunately it accounts for at least 90% of the total text and HTML so goes on forever.  Below is an example of the start:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
<meta name="ProgId" content="Word.Document">
<meta name="Generator" content="Microsoft Word 15">
<meta name="Originator" content="Microsoft Word 15">
<link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:/Users/User/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/22/clip_filelist.xml">
<o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="country-region">
<o:smarttagtype namespaceuri="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" name="place">
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->
<link rel="themeData" href="file:///C:/Users/User/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/22/clip_themedata.thmx">
<link rel="colorSchemeMapping" href="file:///C:/Users/User/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/22/clip_colorschememapping.xml">
<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<w:WordDocument>
<w:View>Normal</w:View>
<w:Zoom>0</w:Zoom>
<w:TrackMoves/>
<w:TrackFormatting/>
<w:PunctuationKerning/>
<w:ValidateAgainstSchemas/>
<w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid>
<w:IgnoreMixedContent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent>
<w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText>
<w:DoNotPromoteQF/>
<w:LidThemeOther>EN-GB</w:LidThemeOther>
<w:LidThemeAsian>X-NONE</w:LidThemeAsian>

This is just a fraction appearing within the item description and so far it is happening from 3 documents I have been using for 15 years with no issues.  I suspect it will be the same on other Word documents I also use.  I will be checking more in the next couple of days.

I believe you could be correct in that it is coming from an external source and I am wondering if it is Microsoft themselves.  I do have a Microsoft Office 365 account and have recently received notifications that changes are being made.

For the time being I think I will just edit out all the newly introduced HTML coding and check out the Notepad++ in the meantime.  Fortunately all my new documents over the last few years have been created on Notepad. 

Thanks again for your input.

[ett1954]

@4_bathrooms  I thought you might be interested in the latest development of this.  From yesterday evening there is no longer an active content warning being displayed although the additional HTML coding remains.

I did a check on some listings prepared last week and sitting in my schedule list, also some recently sold items, and some currently up for sale but prepared some time ago.  In every instance there was no additional HTML coding other than what was to be expected.  However in every instance there was a large blank gap within the coding (probably equivalent to around 10 lines) which I assume is where a block of coding had been removed by eBay.

I had removed all the excess coding from my prepared listings yesterday evening.  I prepared a new listing this morning which had an additional 450+ lines of HTML coding added, no red warning of active content was displayed.  I set up this listing as a test and as at the moment it is active with the additional 450 lines of HTML coding - they have not been removed by eBay.

From this it would appear that in the last few days eBay have changed something which is, or was, falsely highlighting as active content something that wasn't; or is now not picking up and removing active content.  Either way it is certainly not picking up and removing this additional vast quantity of HTML coding.

Not knowing whether this will impact visibility on the site I will, for now, manually remove it until more is known.

I have done a quick check on Notepad++ and it looks promising - I will give it some more attention when I have time.

[4_bathrooms]

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@ett1954 wrote:

<link rel="File-List" href="file:///C:/Users/User/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/22/clip_filelist.xml">

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My gut feeling is lines like this might have been causing the problem - it is a link to a local file on your computer. When such a link appears on a webpage it tries to reference a local file on the viewer's computer instead hence it may have been misidentified as "active content".  Most of the other code you posted isn't HTML but XML (all the bits between the <xml></xml> tags); I would imagine eBay automatically strips all this out as it is only used by Word itself. For example; this bit:

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@ett1954 wrote:

<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
<o:AllowPNG/>
</o:OfficeDocumentSettings>
</xml><![endif]-->

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The first bit is an "if" statement; the XML code between these tags is only used "if the application reading it is greater than or equal to Microsoft Office version 9". This doesn't apply if the application reading it is a web browser so all of this code would be ignored. 

For what it's worth I don't actually use Word nor Microsoft Office; I use Writer from the (free) LibreOffice suite. It can open from and save to Word's .doc and .docx formats but doesn't natively produce all the fluff that a standard Word document does; I can happily recommend it.  

Anyway, it sounds like eBay have reverted whatever change they made that was causing a false positive. 

[ett1954]

Thanks again for the explanation - I have no coding experience; only what I have picked up.  I have used Word for 25 years however it has become overly laborious over the years.  I will certainly check out your recommendation at Libre Office.  My relationship with M.S. Office may be coming to an end anyway depending on the changes they are making to Outlook mail - I am hearing bad reports in the media.  Again 25 years with it in its 'classic' form - ideal for business use however the web version I don't touch finding it more of a 'toy' to be used with 2 inch screens.

Re the XML code, that is interesting because eBay were obviously stripping it out automatically as you stated up until a couple of days ago.  It is still present on the test listing running at the moment so they are not removing it now.