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Why does this site require third-party resources?

0

When I use this site, most things work fine, but I'm forced to load resources from google.com and ajax.googleapis.com for the following:

  • actual submission of questions (otherwise, nothing happens when hitting "Ask your question"),
  • tag and duplicate question suggestions, preview (just a blank space is shown in their place).

Why compromise user privacy by loading stuff from Google? Surely the required resources could be stored locally on this domain. Is there a configuration option for this, or would it need to be added upstream? Does OSM maintain local changes to OSQA? Where are settings and local alterations kept?

(I use NoScript to see and tailor what resources are used from where.)

asked 21 Apr '15, 09:00

Nemo_bis's gravatar image

Nemo_bis
34●4●6●14
accept rate: 0%

edited 21 Apr '15, 22:19

aseerel4c26's gravatar image

aseerel4c26 ♦
32.6k●18●248●554

2 Answers:

3

See https://trac.openstreetmap.org/ticket/5089 ("Help Forum loads stylesheet and script from Google"). The answer there: "wontfix", "this is outside our control" (from our main sysadmin)

answered 21 Apr '15, 22:18

aseerel4c26's gravatar image

aseerel4c26 ♦
32.6k●18●248●554
accept rate: 18%

edited 21 Apr '15, 22:21

Thanks. Actually, I think the closure may be in error. I'll comment there.

(21 Apr '15, 22:24) Nemo_bis
3

The answer on that ticket was the correct answer at the time, but the OSQA version was brought inhouse last year (see my link below SimonPoole's answer).

(21 Apr '15, 22:29) SomeoneElse ♦
2

@SomeoneElse: oh, really? interesting! I have added it to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/help.openstreetmap.org (not yet now existing, which I wanted to create for a long time...) since we cannot freely edit the "about" or "faq" here...

(21 Apr '15, 22:31) aseerel4c26 ♦

2

Because the system is 3rd party software (not developed for OSM) and it loads resources from third parties.

answered 21 Apr '15, 11:45

SimonPoole's gravatar image

SimonPoole ♦
44.7k●13●326●701
accept rate: 18%

edited 09 Sep '16, 23:56

4

As ever the answer with OSM is "because someone, such as you, hasn't made that change yet".

I believe that the version of OSQA used on this site is from here:

https://git.openstreetmap.org/osqa.git/

You could I guess fork a copy of that, make your suggested changes and submit pull requests back (though you'd probably want to talk to the site admins first).

(21 Apr '15, 12:11) SomeoneElse ♦

Often this sort of stuff is a matter of configuration, not code, and can be altered only by sysadmins. On "you'd probably want to talk to the site admins first".

(21 Apr '15, 18:46) Nemo_bis