Facebook tracking

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1

Hi!

I’m using Firefox with the default facebook contrainer feature enabled, that blocks any facebook scripts. Lately I have noticed the fence icon in the top left of the screen that signals some facebook script is blocked.

Looking at the webpage source we can find

<div class="fbc-badge js-fbc-UID_1 fbc-badge-small fbc-badge-share fbc-badge-prompt-align-top fbc-badge-disabled" style="z-index: 3002; left: -12px; top: -5px;"><div class="fbc-badge-fence"></div><div class="fbc-badge-tooltip">Facebook Container has disabled this button and blocked Facebook from tracking your visit to this page.</div><div class="fbc-badge-prompt"></div></div>

which looks to me like some facebook element outside of the visible website area. Is this actively used by someone? If not maybe it could be removed? I don’t really know how Discourse works and if it would be possible but I thought I would just throw it out there.

2

I just did an F12 + find in the main page source for discourse and didn’t see this. My script trackers aren’t reporting anything. FWIW I am logged in as an admin. Can you give me a few more details? I don’t know what you mean by “fence icon”.

I would love nothing more than remove this pernicious blight on privacy.

3

Here is how it looks like for me:

image

Here is how the icon usually looks on facebook buttons etc.:

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I double checked this against Chrome and private window in Firefox and I indeed don’t see anything there! That is quite odd!

4

The only think related to facebook in the settings is that there’s a facebook share link enabled under the “Share Links” with Twitter, Facebook, and Email selected as options. I don’t think it’s so hard to copy the link and share it yourself using facebook or twitter so would suggest that we just turn off those two. options. And that will break the connection to either of those services.

Screenshot from 2020-08-07 23-38-58
Screenshot from 2020-08-07 23-38-58823×421 33.4 KB

There’s already the link copying popup we could even remove the email one and hopefully the whole “share” button would disappear from the UI.

5

The little chain icon is nice to have for copying hyperlinks to specific replies,

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But the same direct link can be fetched from the time stamp, like in github:

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image927×367 14.2 KB

BTW, How is the URL param ?u=<username> useful when sharing discourse threads?

never mind: https://meta.discourse.org/t/share-a-link-for-a-post-should-not-leak-username/66489

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7

Thanks for finding that link @ruffsl

It looks like Discourse is doing the right thing and making it easy to share and the Facebook container is hitting a false positive in their detection.

Since it only goes out to Facebook after you click the share to Facebook link I think we can leave it.

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