Webshield blocking GET request from games

Viruses and worms
1

I’m a game developer and two games are using my system at http://masterserver2.raknet.com , with additional games coming online. One such game was just released on Steam, MotoGP
http://store.steampowered.com/app/240600/

Players have been complaining that Web Shield blocks GET requests from the game to
http://masterserver2.raknet.com/testServer?__gameId=mygame

It blocks the requests silently, without logs, and without prompting the user, even if the user enables prompts.

The TCP data sent is

GET /testServer?__gameId=mygame HTTP/1.1
Host: masterserver2.raknet.com
Connection: Keep-Alive

It also blocks POST requests to the same URL.

Oddly, if I first visit masterserver2.raknet.com from Firefox (but not if I use restclient, or just from the game) then subsequent GET requests work. It makes it hard to develop though since I can’t consistently test how to make it work from the game.

The action I take when there is no response from the server, is to advise users to turn off Web Shield / equivalent web scanners. I’d prefer to work with Web Shield so the GET requests work, as opposed to troubling users to turn it off and/or uninstall it.

Here is a forum post on the topic, with a developer complaining:
http://www.jenkinssoftware.com/forum/index.php?topic=5126.0

Here is another post from players complaining:
http://bzforum.matesfamily.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=1788

EDIT
You can reproduce the issue in many ways, one of which is to download rest-client
https://code.google.com/p/rest-client/

Then just do a GET request against
http://masterserver2.raknet.com/testServer?__gameId=mygame

If you turn off web shield, then do the GET again, it will work

2

Probably not being blocked any longer, can you confirm?

polonus

3

Did you whitelist the site? I have to use a new computer every time I want to test, because once it is whitelisted locally I can’t check if it is blocked anymore or not.

I’m interested in asking how your algorithm works to locally whitelist the site. For example, if I go to masterserver2.raknet.com I can then do the subsequent GET request. I tried creating http://masterserver2.raknet.com/blank.html which I figured your scanner would parse as a link to the GET URL.