What's the deal with Nabble blanking itself?

[dandv]

I'm pretty sure I posted this question before on March 4, but here I go again: On certain configurations of Firefox, Nabble will programmatically (via JavaScript) replace any text on the page with "Nabble". Here is a screenshot. I'm curious as to why this sort of blocking was designed, but don't have enough time to trawl through the JavaScript. The blanking is triggered by Nabble JavaScript code being unable to fetch something from google-analytics, which I had blocked via NoScript.

[Graham Perrin]

dandv wrote

I've disabled both NoScript and AdBlock Plus, but this still occurs.

Curious screen shot. What happens if you disable FoxyProxy and other add-ons?

Regards
Graham

[Hugo <Nabble>]

This wasn't designed and I can't reproduce it. I also can't think of any code that can cause this. If you know how to setup firefox to get this result, please let me know.

Thanks,
Hugo Teixeira
Nabble.com

[dandv]

After a lot of fiddling with Firefox addons, I just managed to reproduce this. It's very simple:

1. Install the NoScript addon in Firefox 3.0.7
2. Load http://n2.nabble.com
3. Mark google-analytics.com as untrusted - Nabble will "blank" itself

[Frank Ralf]

Can confirm the described behavior. Deactivating Google Analytics with NoScript kills all input fields in Nabble, rendering it unusable.

[Burke]

With google-analytics.com disabled in NoScript (Firefox 3+), Nabble is unusable.  For example, I could not respond on this thread without first allowing google-analytics.com.  Our OpenMRS forums fail to render and are unusable.

Hoping this is an unintended bug.  We love Nabble's interface, but do not want to require that users submit to be monitored by Google to view our archives.

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Google analytics is used mainly for statistics and SEO. Why do you think this can be a problem for your forum and users?

[Burke]

Google Analytics provides useful information to a host, but it also allows Google to follow the user between sites to hone their ads.  Not everyone wants to be tracked by Google.  We would prefer not to force our users to submit to Google tracking to view our forums; many would by default, but it shouldn't be a requirement -- i.e., it would be nice if Nabble's website still functioned when google-analytics.com was blocked or, at a minimum, displayed a message such as "We're sorry, but you must enable Google Analytics to use Nabble" instead of masking the forum content.

[Burke]

Hey.  Something changed: Nabble no longer masks itself with Google Analytics disabled!  I still can't post in Nabble without enabling Google Analytics, but at least the forums are readable again.  Yea!  Thanks Nabble!

[Burke]

Yea!  Nabble doesn't depend on Google Analytics to run any longer.