Ghostery should not block first party content

[bluesmoon]

It appears the Ghostery is blocking content from mpulse.soasta.com while browsing mpulse.soasta.com. I cannot see how this would make sense in any context.

[chrmod]

@bluesmoon thank you for reporting.

This may be a correct behaviour, those unidentified trackers are things blocked by the community lists. Most likely so kind of site analytics. Can you please share urls of blocked resources? (you should be able to get them if you click on the tracker name)

If the actual content is being blocked, this is definitely not expected. This we would categorise a Broken Page. Here, again the list of blocked urls would help.

I cannot access this page as it requires an account. Can you share some screenshots of missing content?

[bluesmoon]

Yeah, it's definitely blocking content. I get a blank page because the page JavaScript is blocked.

These are the blocked URLs:

• https://mpulse.soasta.com/concerto/ClientScripts/mpulse.js/mpulse.js?version=62854
• https://mpulse.soasta.com/concerto/img/spacer.gif?version=62854

This is used to fetch and render SPA content on mpulse.soasta.com so it shouldn't be blocked.

It's unlikely that the community lists block these because the only people who actually see these scripts are paying customers of mPulse, and it blocks functionality that they have paid for.

[bluesmoon]

[chrmod]

Have verify the source of the blockage and it is Easylist Privacy in both cases:

• https://mpulse.soasta.com/concerto/img/spacer.gif?version=62854 is blocked by /spacer.gif
• https://mpulse.soasta.com/concerto/ClientScripts/mpulse.js/mpulse.js?version=62854 blocker by /mpulse.js

[chrmod]

The only solution that we can apply is to replace those filters with ones that apply as third party only, that is /spacer.git$3p and /mpulse.js$3p. But this will help with Ghostery only. As long original filters are in the Easylist Privacy, other adblockers like uBlockOrigin, Brave or AdGuard will also cause same breakage. You can try to propose changes to the EasyPrivacy as a solution that will work for all adblockers.

[bluesmoon]

Thanks for the investigation. I've opened an issue on EasyPrivacy to get their feedback.

[bluesmoon]

@chrmod it looks like EasyList has closed the issue as "Not Planned". That would leave modifying Ghostery as the only option here.

[chrmod]

With community lists it's best to offer exact solution with minimal side-effects. They are most often right to have blocking as broad as possible. In this case we can try to fix the breakage on your sites.

Maybe this will work https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/19367