RFD: DW inbox buttons inactive for a number of people?

[pauamma]

So there's a bunch of requests, going back to at least December 2018 and maybe at least September 2018, all reporting that some buttons on the DW inbox have no effect when clicked. The buttons concerned are "Delete Selected", "Mark Read", "Mark Unread", and perhaps "Delete All". The requests themselves are:

https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=40012
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=39872
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=39869
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=39827
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=39796
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=39626 (which has a copypasta of the Chrome console error log that may be a clue)
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=39566
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=39201
https://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=38992 (but it is unclear to me whether this is the same problem)

However, the "Delete Selected" button works for me. Any opinion? Could it be add-ons interfering with Javascript? (The copypasta seems to me to be hinting at a code error in some Javascript library inherited from 6Apart instead, but I'm not a Javascript kinda crab.)

Comments

[kaberett]

http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/see_request?id=40067 - alexseanchai flagging up that the problem may (sometimes) be due to links off-site?

[pauamma]

Hmm. Maybe. Worth sending off troubleshooting questions based on that, you think?

[kaisa]

I was bored and played with that.

It seems like in that post the fanfiction.net badge image takes over 90 seconds of trying before it finally fails to load and during that time the buttons don't work. They start working after the badge image has finally finished trying and has failed to load.

The URL being trying to load is https://p.dreamwidth.org/bc241795acb1/-/www.fanfiction.net/static/images/favicon_2010_site.png and it gives this error:

504 ERROR
The request could not be satisfied.
CloudFront attempted to establish a connection with the origin, but either the attempt failed or the origin closed the connection.
If you received this error while trying to use an app or access a website, please contact the provider or website owner for assistance.
If you provide content to customers through CloudFront, you can find steps to troubleshoot and help prevent this error by following steps in the CloudFront documentation (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/http-504-gateway-timeout.html).

Generated by cloudfront (CloudFront)

Once the little bit over 90 seconds has passed and the icon has failed to load, then the buttons work again. But during that 90 seconds the buttons don't work.

Since I'm completely out of the loop about how things work nowadays, I googled a bit and found out that the p.dreamwidth.org is a image proxy that serves http images as https. So I'm *guessing* the javascript for the buttons is waiting for the page to finish loading, and this image proxy is taking way too long to fail?

[kaberett]

... you are amazing, thank you so much for poking at this. In process of getting a bug filed for this now.

[kaisa]

No problem.

I guess I see three things to look at.

1. Waiting for the whole page to load before allowing js to run is not necessary a good idea, and I see that is dealt with nfagerlund's pull request. 👍

2. Why is image proxy request returning that 504 error when the url does return the badge image in browser? (There is a 301 Moved response first, but Go should be able to follow redirects automatically so maybe it is something else. I don't know enough about Go or the setup to troubleshoot this.) I'm just wondering if this is a bug, too.

3. To avoid unnecessary image proxy requests, it would probably make sense to change the hardcoded FanFiction badge image url to point directly to the https protocol, as they do serve it in https.

[pauamma]

Has https://github.com/dreamwidth/dw-free/pull/2491 been pushed to production? I'd like to check which of these requests are now fixed.

ETA 2019-08-22 *nudge*

[pauamma]

Interesting. https://www.fanfiction.net/static/images/favicon_2010_site.png (loading directly via https instead of proxying) loads immediately. Perhaps the badge image source should be that instead of (I guess) the proxied/http version?

[rebelsheart]

My thought would be noScript or similar. I'm running Privacy Badger and HTTPS Everywhere, neither of which are stopping me from using the button.