Hi all,
It’s impossible to answer “how does OJS behave when there’s a firewall or antivirus active on the user’s machine” in general, because that software can do whatever it wants and different packages behave differently. But in general terms, OJS is just like any other web application and doesn’t have any special requirements of the connection between client and server.
Speaking in general, firewalls and anti-virus programs contain sets of rules that are used to detect malicious content. Sometimes those rules are overly general and result in “false positives”, i.e. a normal request gets flagged as malicious and is prevented from being communicated. We’ve seen examples of this on server-side firewall software; see e.g. this thread. In those cases, it’s sometimes possible to investigate the firewall software’s logs more closely to determine what set it off.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team