CUNY Academic Commons

Solved! Read from the bottom up if you're curious:

mweber
mweber@gc.cuny.edu | February 23, 2024 12:41 pm
Glad it's solved! https://historyprogram.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ is actually my page and you had me squinting. It doesn't show on Chrome.

Guest
Christopher.Silsby@baruch.cuny.edu | February 23, 2024 12:25 pm
Aaaand I tried opening those pages in a different browser, and the error isn’t there.

So never mind. It must be my tracking protection in Firefox that is causing it.

Sorry for the confusion.

------------------
Christopher Silsby, Ph.D.
Blogs@Baruch Manager
Center for Teaching and Learning
Baruch College, City University of New York

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Guest
Christopher.Silsby@baruch.cuny.edu | February 23, 2024 12:19 pm

Sure.

Here are a few from the main commons.gc.cuny.edu page, https://historyprogram.commons.gc.cuny.edu/, and https://tlhbox.commons.gc.cuny.edu/ so show the error across different sites. Some of them are kind of difficult to see, dark grey on darker grey, or black on dark grey. But I circled them so you can see what I mean.

------------------
Christopher Silsby, Ph.D.
Blogs@Baruch Manager
Center for Teaching and Learning
Baruch College, City University of New York

Yes, we use the Cookies for Comments plugin, which outputs a css.php image file into each page. We use this to combat comment spam, as well as brute-force logins.

Unfortunately, some browser addons and filter lists will block this image. In this case, perhaps just the image alt text -- css.php -- will show up when blocked. I couldn't replicate this myself. I'm guessing another Firefox addon might be displaying the image alt text for accessibility reasons. Just a theory though.

Any way we can work around this? If we hide the element with CSS, will it break the cookie functionality? If so, can we do it with JS instead?

window.addEventListener( 'load', function() {
  const cssPhpImg = document.getElementById( ... )

  cssPhpImg.addEventListener( 'error', function() {
    // hide the image
  } );
} );

I've removed the "alt" attribute in the cookies-for-comments plugin in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/82675e2a2ec00a2a90c263b0d137d9983410f9fa . This will be deployed as part of tomorrow's maintenance release.