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Here's @vsund, author of this commit message. I understand that the title may was a bit clickbaity and now the title got renamed to a more rational one (which i

by vsund 9y ago

Here's @vsund, author of this commit message. I understand that the title may was a bit clickbaity and now the title got renamed to a more rational one (which is totally ok). Unfortunately the new title "A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'" doesn't reflect the situation very well in my opinion. The library didn't fail (mainly because there is no library yet), what instead happened is that the adblocker blocked GitHub internal requests which resulted in a unusable repository. The adblocker blocks requests that simply has "beacon.js" anywhere in the URL. I see this rather as an issue of adblockers blocking to much than bad naming of projects :)

chillydawg 9y ago
As one of an extremely large group of people who will never use that library but DO get protected from some ads and tracking by blacklisting beacon.js, I disagree that it's an issue with ad blockers. The internet is a toxic place, to put it mildly, and if you're getting into any kind of public facing service on it, you need to know exactly what you're doing.
- vsund 9y ago
  I totally agree with you, but I think adblockers could do better than just block all requests that have "beacon.js" in it. But yeah, I definitely prefer many protected users about one working library :) There are so many possibilities to block content, I'm sure that we could do better with protecting users against tracking while ensuring that less content gets blocked false-positive.
- f4rker 9y ago
  They are called "ad blockers" but block all kinds of "non ad" content that breaks sites in unexpected ways.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Wait, you're saying that a false positive in an ad blocker is _not_ an issue with the ad blocker? Of course it is! Blocking files based solely on their names is a brittle and error-prone way of doing things, and this false positive is a clear example of that.
  - chillydawg 9y ago
    For sure it's a false positive and I wish it didn't happen. But it does happen and there's no way I'm ditching my ad blocker just because of some small number of false positives.
deleted 9y ago
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by vsund 9y ago

chillydawg 9y ago

As one of an extremely large group of people who will never use that library but DO get protected from some ads and tracking by blacklisting beacon.js, I disagree that it's an issue with ad blockers. The internet is a toxic place, to put it mildly, and if you're getting into any kind of public facing service on it, you need to know exactly what you're doing.

vsund 9y ago
I totally agree with you, but I think adblockers could do better than just block all requests that have "beacon.js" in it. But yeah, I definitely prefer many protected users about one working library :) There are so many possibilities to block content, I'm sure that we could do better with protecting users against tracking while ensuring that less content gets blocked false-positive.
f4rker 9y ago
They are called "ad blockers" but block all kinds of "non ad" content that breaks sites in unexpected ways.
Ajedi32 9y ago
Wait, you're saying that a false positive in an ad blocker is _not_ an issue with the ad blocker? Of course it is! Blocking files based solely on their names is a brittle and error-prone way of doing things, and this false positive is a clear example of that.
- chillydawg 9y ago
  For sure it's a false positive and I wish it didn't happen. But it does happen and there's no way I'm ditching my ad blocker just because of some small number of false positives.

deleted 9y ago

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