Sign in
Log inSign up

That cat and mouse game of programmer vs programmer

Mario Giambanco's photo
Mario Giambanco
·May 10, 2017

Or - How I had to install an ad blocker detection script on a site that doesn't serve ads.

Recently, Chrome Mac OS has been strait up crashing on me, mid day. At first I thought it was some random Chrome extension, so I deleted all the extensions, deleted Chrome, reinstalled, etc... Still happening, I thought (and still think) it was our internal chat app - an incredibly outdated app called Lan Messenger but we use it because communications is only over our lan and not through the internet.

In the process of reinstalling the Chrome extensions, I switched to Superblock from Ad Block - they must all be the same I thought.

Browsing one of my sites today that doesn't serve ads, at all - I noticed our social share icons were missing...

Being quick to blame Rackspace and their less then stellar service and performance lately, I quickly went to status.rackspace.com to see if the CDN was having difficulty - nope. Everything is green.

Inspect the code - visit the images directly thinking maybe the images got corrupt or something stupid - images load fine.

Inspect the CSS - maybe something got screwed up? display: none; ? Nope - again - everything looks fine.

Now I'm all WTF?!? And I catch it out of the corner of my eye - Superblock icon in the extensions section with a 2 on it. We don't run ads I say to myself. WTF is it blocking - Google Analytics? To the console we go and sure enough -

(cdn url)/facebook.png ERR_BLOCKED_BY_CLIENT

Thinking maybe it's still the Rackspace CDN, I go to another site that uses similarly named images but doesn't use a CDN to store them and sure enough, their blocked also.

Great - Superblock blocks filenames of social networks. That's just swell.

Disable Superblock for the domain and everything comes back just fine.

Following detectadblock.com to embed a quick message and now I have a please don't use an ad blocker message for a site that doesn't use ads. (And I'm not renaming the files)

Moral of the story -

Just when you think everything is going well - you've tested, re-tested; dotted every I, crossed every T - something completely unrelated can just say Nope! Not good enough and screw things up, haha.

1