CUNY Academic Commons

I'm unable to test on a Mac, but main.js on Windows 10, Chrome 62 loads at around 250 - 330ms over here from the Commons homepage, which is pretty fast.

However, loading main.js in a separate tab took close to 6 seconds over here, which is quite long.

Matt, were you on a wifi connection?

It might have been a hiccup with Zendesk's server sending the JS request.

For now, I have implemented Boone's second point in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/e3aa1a3fe9537e9c25bcdd868164134eb4b3853c. This is live on production.

While looking into this issue, I found that other people had similar concerns about Zendesk's JS being too large and affecting load time:
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/206495757-Slow-Widget

At the end of that thread, a developer coded an alternative Zendesk widget with PHP and jQuery that is lighter than Zendesk's default widget:
https://github.com/mauricekindermann/z_widget

If we went this route, we would probably need to add anti-spam measures to this custom Zendesk form.

Ha, the response from Zendesk on that thread to all the complaints about library size is pretty much "too bad".

It'd be helpful to know whether this problem is really widespread. If it's only something that happens occasionally, due to high traffic or something, then maybe we can just live with it.

Just as a point of information, any email to support@cunycommons.zendesk.com results in the creation of a ticket, though with less info than the Zendesk widget supplies (like the page the user was on when the help button was clicked), so as a last resort, we could design our own email form if this problem becomes more widespread.

In the meantime, I'll keep testing the button from my Mac/Chrome set-up to see if it persists

for me, now, it is opening up just as a mailto link, which I guess means that the ZenDesk script is timing out?

Probably. Can you open the Network tab of your browser's developer tools, type 'zendesk' into the Filter dialog, and do a hard refresh of the page?

Matt Gold wrote:

for me, now, it is opening up just as a mailto link, which I guess means that the ZenDesk script is timing out?

Either that, or your Chrome set up is blocking the Zendesk JS from downloading. You said you installed some adblocking addons on Chrome. It's entirely possible that those requests are being blocked if you disabled 3rd-party assets from downloading.

Can you try Firefox on Mac and see if you are able to duplicate?

Matt, would you mind checking to see whether this is still happening for you? If it was due to temporary network-related issues, we can probably close out the ticket. (I've just verified that it's working for me, outside of the GC.)

Hm. I'm also experiencing the problem on Mac/Chrome, but only there - all other combinations of browsers and OS seem to work OK.

In my case, it looks like the Privacy Badger extension is the culprit. If I disable it, or whitelist assets.zendesk.com, everything works fine.

Matt, can you confirm whether you're using a similar privacy extension, and whether disabling it fixes the problem?

There are limits to what we can do with browsers that intentionally block scripts like this. There are legitimate privacy concerns with the loading of third-party JS.

Yup -- that's exactly it, Boone. I am using Privacy Badger with Chrome. I think I am likely an edge case and that a straight mailto link is an acceptable alternative. If you agree, let's close this ticket. Sorry for the bother!

If you are using adblocking and privacy-related addons, it is expected that you know what you are doing though.

With that being said, we could do one of the following:
- Host Zendesk's JS ourselves as mentioned in the first comment. Potential problems are that we are out-of-sync with Zendesk's JS API if they ever change anything.
- Create our own Zendesk contact form as mentioned in the second comment. Implementing this would especially lighten the JS load, but would take a tiny bit of dev time. If this is a priority, I can work on this.

Since this is a problem only for tinfoil-hat types, let's not do anything for now. If we get complaints in the future (especially about performance, which wasn't the issue here but is definitely a general problem with the widget) we can circle back.

Boone Gorges wrote:

Since this is a problem only for tinfoil-hat types, let's not do anything for now. If we get complaints in the future (especially about performance, which wasn't the issue here but is definitely a general problem with the widget) we can circle back.

I have decided to take this as a compliment ;)