AOL9.0 and continuously sent AJAX requests

Question

We have a campaign up and running that collects clicks. Over 50,000 clicks have been recorded from 2 different IP addresses, both with the user-agent's set to AOL9.0. I was wondering if there is a known AOL9.0 + AJAX issue or if someone is just masking their user-agent.

UA String

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; AOL 9.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; MDDC; BRI/1; .NET4.0C; BRI/2)

Seems much more likely to be multiple users proxied through a small number of IP addresses. — Ken Redler, Sep 23 '11 at 18:55
Ah, good to know, however, the requests were coming every two seconds for about 2 hours straight. — Dan, Sep 23 '11 at 18:59
It was me, I just can't help but click things over and over =P — Jack, Sep 23 '11 at 19:10

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 23 '11 at 19:05

I do believe AOL proxies their users. Verify this by running a whois on the source IP addresses. If they are registered to AOL, then it seems likely those are proxy servers. Also check your logs to see if that UA string appears in any significant amount from other IP addresses.

As far as AJAX issues in the AOL browser, I do remember a long time ago bumping in to an issue where the response being served with Transfer-Encoding: chunked would cause the AOL browser to barf. Specifically, the chunked encoding is not 'decoded', so the hex length value is passed to your script, causing a JSON parse error. If your script expects a response and retries if it gets an error, it is possible that your code is going into an infinite retry loop.

AOL9.0 and continuously sent AJAX requests

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