During the past few weeks, we have been getting reports from people about Adobe Acrobat suddenly opening when trying to visit esctoday.com. For an equally long period of time we have been without clues on what could have caused this.

But now, finally, the problem seems to be solved. It appears to have been caused by the statistical software used to generate our website statistics. The process of detecting whether or not the visitor has Acrobat Reader installed was misinterpreted by Acrobat versions 3 and 4 as a command to open the software.

We use the information on installed plugins to decide in which other formats we can provide our content. This tells us, for example, that 72.3% of our visitors are able to view PDF documents. And 96.2% will be able to use the Macromedia Flash Enhanced Navigation, which we are planning to use in the new version of esctoday.com.

For the reference of other developers coping with similar problems. The problems were caused by the AWStats “misc tracker” and solved by commenting out line 103 in “awstats_misc_tracker.js”, which says:

if (awstats_detectIE(“PDF.PdfCtrl.1”) == 'y') { TRKpdf = 'y'; }