Tull

Just got another response back from the "Product Specialist" assigned to my ticket.  

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Angie S. (Squarespace)

Sep 27, 2023, 4:10 PM EDT

Hi Tull,
 
Thank you for your prompt response. I'm glad to hear that it worked this time. After touching base with the engineering team they are also aware of the fix. Customers who previously had this issue are also saying its working now so it seems the fix put into place has worked for everyone.  
 
Thank you for continuing to reach out about this error and your candid feedback. Please let me know if you need anything else. 

So, all's well that ends well, and "case closed".

Whew!  😉

I've heard back from my customers who re-tried their downloads today, and they worked!   I also took MFA's advice and tried a zip download with Chrome myself, and had no issues.

Of course, I'd feel better if someone from Squarespace would confirm that they actually found/fixed something.   I'll probably leave the information about the issue in my outgoing emails to digital product customers for the time being.   But it's definitely looking good!

I just got the following response from "Angie" from Squarespace:

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My name is Angie and I’m a Team Lead here at Squarespace. Thank you so much for your patience while I took some additional time to review your escalated ticket. As Rory promised, your case has been assigned to me and I will be taking ownership of this moving forward.
 
I had a chance to closely read through your chat transcript, and can see that you were requesting an update on an ongoing issue with Chrome blocking ZIP files.
 
After reviewing documentation, I can see that there have been no updates and/or other workarounds provided.
 
While none of our documentation has been updated. I know from a post on Squarespace forum that someone was able to successfully download a ZIP file without a warning roughly 10 hours ago. Have you had any downloads today that were successful, as well? 
 
If not, at this time I can assure your our engineering team is aware of this issue and we hope to see this resolved in time. 

So, she is referencing the recent posts in this thread to let me know that, even though there is no documentation to support it, she thinks the issue might be resolved due to this "anecdotal evidence".

I've generated re-freshed links for some of my customers who reported this issue recently, and reached out to them to ask them to try their downloads again WITHOUT disabling the "safe browsing" setting in Chrome.   Waiting to hear back from them as to how it is working now.

Fingers crossed ... and breath held!  😉

Just had another "live chat" experience with Squarespace, asking for an update on progress with this issue (just had e-mails from more angry customers unable to download their purchased products today).  The first response was "This is something on Google's end that they control and Squarespace has no control over what Google will flag".   I then mentioned that I have colleagues/competitors who are using other platforms (Shopify is one that I know of) that have NO issues with Chrome users downloading zip files.   Also, my current "workaround" is to manually send my customers their purchased zip files using either DropBox or WeTransfer, and they have no problems downloading the same zip file with Chrome using those services.   The chat representative said this was "new information" (that Chrome worked fine on other platforms), and promised to escalate the issue to a "Product Specialist".   He promised I would hear something back from the P.S. within a few days.   Fingers crossed (but breath NOT held)!

I'm also getting inundated with angry customers unable to download their digital products because of this issue.   As a (hopefully temporary) work-around, I have modified the e-mail notification that gets sent out to digital download customers, explaining the issue, and how to TEMPORARILY disable the "Safe Browsing" option in Chrome's security settings to enable the Zip file to be downloaded ... and then change it back.   I include a screen-shot image of that specific page, and explain how they can navigate to that page.   I also tell them if they aren't comfortable doing it that way, and they don't have access to a different browser like Edge, Firefox, Safari, etc, to contact me and I'll send them their product using something like We Transfer.   It's not a very satisfying solution, and appears pretty "unprofessional", but it's the best I could come up with for now, and does seem to have greatly reduced the angry e-mails.   btw, I tell them the way to get to the Chrome security settings screen is to open a new tab, and type  "chrome://settings/security" in the URL bar.

The (somewhat) good news is I've had interaction with several of the "live chat" help desk folks about this over the past couple of days, and they all have said that "Squarespace engineers are looking into it", and "It is a priority issue".   Assuming we can take them at their word about that, it's a much better response than "Not our problem" which was the initial response many folks seemed to have been getting early on.