New forum software and technical committee

[thorough]

Despite my missing reputation here (I'm really not into registering in forums which can be used without giving away your e-mail address), I have been modifying phpBBs since the 1.x series. While I'd say that modern phpBBs - at least the 3.2 series - should not be extended by anything but add-on hooks, I would volunteer to contribute opinions or something.

(Not working as a PHP dev anymore, but I still know my way through it, I guess.)

[andrewjoy]

Lets not go for this horrible monstrosity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_(software)

[thorough]

Discourse can't (hassle-free) be used without JavaScript, which is a very good reason to avoid it.

[kbdfr]

Has someone be playing with the software, or has the latest version of Firefox some new weird feature?

Here’s how DT (and only DT!) looks like (can’t preview with the pic, though):

[thorough]

It worked earlier today (Firefox 61).

[Blaise170]

No issues here.

[Muirium]

Fine for me too, on Safari.

Looks like styles are disabled for some reason. You got a site specific preference / one of Firefox’s multitude of plugins at play?

[kbdfr]

Thanks for checking, folks, and special thank to µ for the hint.

I checked all my (very few) Firefox add-ons and found out that deactivating Adblock Plus solved the problem and reactivating it caused DT to display uncorrectly again.
So I had a look at the preferences in Adblock Plus and as I found nothing relevant, I just tried a few things.
In the end, the solution was simple: adding deskthority.net to the Whitelist

[Muirium]

Ah, Adblock Plus. I remember its curious, opinionated choices from back in my own Firefox days. (PowerPC Mac, before Safari got any extensibility at all.) Ghostery is what I use on the Mac these days and never throws up such problems, in years of use. In iOS, meanwhile, I rely on Firefox Focus for “content blocking” in Safari! Firefox as an extension.

A little surprised you didn’t double check with a second computer, browser or phone. Tut tut!

[andrewjoy]

I would consider switching to uBlock origin, much better and easy to understand than the mess that is ABP.

That with Nostript and https everywhere !

[Blaise170]

Second uBlock, been using it for about a year now and it's better in nearly every way (also I really don't like that ABP sold out and now displays "relevant ads").

[andrewjoy]

My favourite thing is the " Annoyances " section that lets you block 3rd party social media crap.

So it gets rid of all the share this on facebook and twitter buttons and hides the look at the tweets about this section of websites.

Twitter is for checking when your having a dump , i dont want it all over the internet thank you.

[kbdfr]

[…] A little surprised you didn’t double check with a second computer, browser or phone. Tut tut!

No second computer, and no Internet on my phone. I tried the IE - correct display, but that didn’t solve my problem

I would consider switching to uBlock origin, much better and easy to understand than the mess that is ABP. […]

I’ll give it a try the same way I gave ABP a try: someone recommended it to me, I installed it and it worked to my satisfaction.
That is: until now

Second uBlock, been using it for about a year now and it's better in nearly every way (also I really don't like that ABP sold out and now displays "relevant ads").

There seems to be a lot I am unaware of

[…] So it gets rid of all the share this on facebook and twitter buttons and hides the look at the tweets about this section of websites. […]

Do these "social" media buttons really disappear? And why did nobody tell me before?

[Blaise170]

There seems to be a lot I am unaware of

Ha yes yes. View full content here.

The Acceptable Ads initiative is beneficial because it encourages the ad industry to pursue less intrusive ad formats, thus having a positive impact on the Internet as a whole. It also provides us with a viable source of revenue, paid only by larger participants in the Acceptable Ads initiative, which we need in order to be able to administer and maintain the program and continue development of a free product.

And further:

According to the survey, only 25 percent of Adblock Plus users are strictly against all advertising. They can disable the feature and browse completely ad-free. The other 75 percent replied that they would accept some advertising to help support websites.

A.K.A. The 1000 people who cared enough to respond to a survey from a browser extension apparently think ads are fine, which kind of contradicts the whole idea of an adblocker.

[chuckdee]

There seems to be a lot I am unaware of

Ha yes yes. View full content here.

I actually don't find it better, in my experience. Still using the original instead of origins. When I first tried origins, it used a _lot_ more resources for pretty much no gain. Not sure if it has refined since, but standard uBlock works well enough for me, in concert with Disconnect.

[Blaise170]

To be fair I don't technically use an ad blocker at all, but my VPN has uBlock Origin built in.

[kbdfr]

[…] my VPN […]

Whatever that might be

I remember a time when in order to connect e.g. a printer to your data processing machine, you had to insert jumpers, select obscure settings, position a row of dip switches, define rules, program exceptions, and the like - at a time the average user never had had anything to do with that kind of stuff before.
And then, praise them, someone found a way to just connect the devices and let them figure out how to work together

[thorough]

[…] my VPN […]

Whatever that might be

VPN = Virtual Private Network. You could think of it as a sophisticated proxy that routes you through a remote network to the internet.

[Blaise170]

If you are familiar with Tor, it is effectively a multiple-hop VPN. VPNs (and Tor) works by routing you to an encrypted server so that anyone trying to hijack or otherwise view your traffic only sees encrypted bits. This is how some people can appear in Finland while actually residing in Japan (for example).

[Muirium]

Something tells me you guys are saying this for another audience besides the skeptical chocolate bar himself. Like maybe one that cares? Quite why they’d visit a behind-the-scenes technical thread on, let’s remind ourselves, a keyboard forum, when looking for networking obfuscation tips, well, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the *cough* helpful among us.

[Shihatsu]

Please don't use noscript or ghostery - they are selling your data, providing malware via their sites and sometimes via their auto-updates, have been working together with adblock and are basically shady as shit.
uMAtrix works the same and better, but requires more configuration time and effort, which in my opinion is an advantage. You got to think about what you are doing. Have no fear, though, there are plenty of how-tos about it.

[andrewjoy]

Have you got any sources to back that up. Interesting in looking into this if true.

[Muirium]

Ghostery tells you about (and let’s you opt out of) some analytics thing they do, for money. I’d rather have them harvesting my data than the ad vendors themselves, plus their irritating payloads. Given just how little I buy online (not a single purchase this year on Amazon for instance) my data is just noise in the signal.

[andrewjoy]

As long as they tell you they are doing it and are clear about exactly what they are collecting i can almost accept that. BUT! There is potential there for them to lose the data to shitty security incompetence or to government prying (and its usually all three combined).

This is part of the reason i run my own VPN for myself and a few friends ,i send all the logs to the null device, that way if someone did do something dodgy on the server, there are no logs to give out or lose. I mean i would tell the government to go fuck themselves anyway but still.

[Shihatsu]

Have you got any sources to back that up. Interesting in looking into this if true.

It is easy to find out there - ghostery even tells you about it, and some of it seems to have changed recently:
https://www.wired.com/story/ghostery-op ... ess-model/
But having the original opt-out hidden quite good and beeing owned by cliqz, who have hijacked some firefox updates via a deal with mozilla (and again hid their opt-out quite well) just shows that this was not a mistake, but part of their business model. That's where my "shady as fuck" comes from. There is more to find, for example that Ghostery per default does not block certain 3rd-party-cookies like that from facebook, or what the developers of privacy badger think about it.
Ghostsyript is done way more shorter and easier, just one link is enough:
https://liltinkerer.surge.sh/noscript.html
@Murium: Sorry, no offense, but your argument is on the same level like "I got nothing to hide, so please store any data of me".