No links working in Chrome - down to Adblock Plus

Similarly to http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/site-seems-to-be-broken-in-chrome-1424083/ and http://www.giantbomb.com/forums/bug-reporting-33/link-s-busted-in-chrome-1424110/#5 I had the issue of not being able to do anything in chrome as none of the links worked.

I disabled all extensions and it worked fine, and then re-enabled them one by one - the only extension the site didn't work with is Adblock Plus.

The site also seems to work if I disable adblock for giantbomb.com - as soon as I re-enable it everything stops working again.

Is this intentional or just some wierd bug?

There is ADs??? I have adblock and its working great

Seems that there is code that prevent browsers from following a link or play button until the site can send off some tracking data to Google Analytics, CBSi, imrworldwide, etc.; when ad-blockers or privacy add-ons, extensions, or proxies keep tracking data from being sent or tracking scripts from even loading, the site just hangs, having prevented the browser from following the link until the analytics data has been sent—which it never will, because those things are not allowed! (That is the <a> onclick handlers preventDefault() without checking whether or not the analytics have or ever will go through.)

This is a real bummer, because I can't control what proxies are enabled on all my machines; GB used to work fine, but it seems that in the new site 403'ing these trackers breaks ALL links and play buttons. I would really appreciate being able to click links and play videos everywhere I could before.

Thanks for taking a look at this, GB. I realize the site was a lot of work—is a lot of work—and it all looks good and behaves well (when it behaves).

@lucasrizoli said:

That's pretty much it in a nutshell. Unfortunately the js that is causing this is from the tracking service and had been obfuscated in the worse way possible. Tracking down where exactly in their code it's doing this has not been fun. However, we do know that if someone is blocking cbsi.com (specifically om.cbsi.com or som.cbsi.com), that's when the links stop working. The tracking service's js really should not assume that the request will be successful. Until then, I'm still trying to come up with a solution to deal with the problem.

Thanks for looking into it, @Tsubomi. Your attention is appreciated; I hope this can be fixed soon, maybe sent along so it can also improve other CBSi-tracked sites.

Cheers—and good luck!

So, uh, this is still an issue. Is there anything that could be done?

We're still dealing with the issue (I should say @tsubomi is). Unfortunately, cleaning up somebody else's javascript tends to not be as easy as cleaning up your own.

Currently, the quickest fix for this is to whitelist om.cbsi.com. The problem lies in how Site Catalyst's (Omniture) js deals with webkit browsers. They have javascript that specifically targets webkit browsers to prevent the click from leaving the page before the tracking request is done. I've tracked it down to a portion of their code where the request to om.cbsi.com gets made. The code is quitting somewhere in there when requests to om.cbsi.com are blocked, most likely because the request from the page load never "finished". I'll need more time to figure out what's going on in the code and whether we can even work out a solution on our end.

white listing GB would be the classy thing to do. Nobody likes ads but if the site dies then you will be sorry you made a minor contribution to killing it.

I pay a subscription, you bet your ass I am keeping my adblock on.

Why? There are no ads for subscribers. You're not blocking anything.

@louiedog: I used to be a monthly member, only yearly has no ads I just never really thought about that till now I guess.

Edit: Huh. Seems to be working fine from behind the proxy now. Great!

On certain computers, I haven't the access to whitelist anything.

I understand that the crummy outcome may be due to code you don't control directly, but something can be done about it, right?

It's an inconvenience to me, but from my perspective it also seems like a flaw the design of the analytics aspect of the site that should be addressed. It's an oversight to cancel the behavior of links—links, the thing that makes the web a web—without covering cases where the code might break or the data it sends to the mothership takes a long time, neh?