3.19.0 - Shops that could not connect at all

Shops that could not connect at all

Some shops could not connect to eBay however many times they tried, and nothing they changed made any difference.

Their server's requests were reaching us. A security filter at our hosting was answering them with a page asking the caller to run JavaScript — something a browser can do and a server cannot. So the connection never completed, and the message you got said nothing about why.

That filter chooses its targets by the internet address a request comes from, and reputation systems classify whole ranges of addresses at a time: shared hosting, home broadband. A shop sitting on one gets caught through nobody's fault, and there is nothing the shop can change to get out of it.

Connecting now goes to an address set aside for it and exempted from that filter. If it cannot be reached for any reason, the plugin falls back to the routes it used before, so nothing that works today is put at risk by the change.

The connection test on the Settings page now reports on both addresses, and checks the name and certificate of the one actually used for connecting. A server whose DNS has not yet caught up with the new address is something that test will now find.

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Upgrade notes: nothing to do. If you have been unable to connect, update and try again.

If you were not affected, this changes nothing you will notice.