We have heard of a few cases of interface problems with proxies, issues such as menus not opening, mouse over text not displaying, featured journals/books not showing, and the date selection box not working. This is not the case with all proxies, but seems to have something to do with specifically how the proxy is configured. Therefore here are a few items the customer should check with their proxy technician or administrator:
1. Check that the proxy is not configured to block JavaScript, because some elements on our site require JavaScript to work.
2. Some proxies also block cookies above a certain size, which may cause problems as well. Check that the proxy is not doing this(See, for example, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5016294/proxy-server-breaking-Ajax-website-on-internal-network)
3. If pdf links are found not to work, be sure the proxy is configured to encode special characters such as slashes in URLs. For example, compare:
- http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs00701-012-1514-y and
- http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00701-012-1514-y
The first one tells the server to go to: http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/ and get file 10.1007%2Fs00701-012-1514-y.pdf. The second one tells the server to go to: http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/ and get file s00701-012-1514-y.pdf, which is not correct and will fail. In other cases, some DOIs have unusual characters such as square brackets that can cause a similar problem. The proxy should be configured to understand URL encoding.