ServiceWorker thinks I'm offline when I'm not

But it wouldn’t surprise me if this wasn’t just Adblock Plus but rather a combination of Discourse and something Blocking extensions do.

1 Like

Whoa, nice sleuthing! I never suspected adblockers as a culprit to some of the service worker cache issues - I’m curious to learn why adblockers block service workers’ request features, or what about it looks suspicious to them.

4 Likes

We have this issue too and I have google ad blocker.

3 Likes

@codinghorror what is your call here, do we junk the offline page for now (from non android) cause Adblock Plus messes it up or do we keep it and keep supporting people complaining about adblock.

(Note this is not about removal of the service worker, just the way it creates the “your browser is offline” page)

I am not very sympathetic to self inflicted adblock issues

7 Likes

I’ve been running ABP (chrome, FF, MacOS Sierra) and haven’t hit that issue at all. I run ABP in the default mode, nothing tweaked, not sure if that makes a difference. Using multiple communities besides my own (Discourse hosted) and meta.

1 Like

As I’m with you on that, it may look very unprofessional to customers if they cannot visit a forum because “they are offline”, which they aren’t.

For me, this is not a problem at all, since I know how to work around. But since the problem is not only happening with ABP (see #17 and #24), I see the task to change something on discourse’s shoulders.

Post #17

Post #24

Neither of those are Discourse, so I respectfully disagree that it has anything to do with us.

2 Likes

The issue with matomo forums was opened by me. So I have to disagree that it has nothing to do with Discourse, as the matomo forum is a Discourse instance. And it is the only thing I know of that has this sort of problem.

1 Like

You got to report this to Adblock plus, yes we can workaround by stripping a feature but this must be reported to the broken chrome plugin

11 Likes

I just managed to reproduce this issue on try by visiting a topic with a title starting with the word “Advertising”:

https://try.discourse.org/t/advertising-i-wonder-if-having-the-word-advertising-in-the-title-is-enough-to-set-off-ad-blockers/997/1

It appears to be looking for watchwords. It definitely seems like a rabbit hole to work around this.

9 Likes

I have seen this issue on all (about four) discourse forums that I visit.

I’m using Firefox with these privacy plugins:

  • HTTPS Everywhere
  • Privacy Badger
  • DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials
  • uBlock Origin

Workaround: click the reload button while holding the shift key.

3 Likes

I believe we have this fixed now cause we check the network status using navigator.onLine prior to showing the page.

Can anyone still reproduce this issue?

This topic was automatically closed after 30 hours. New replies are no longer allowed.