Something I have noticed in my firewall logs is that every time I go to a base forum (MPSIMS, IMHO, etc), there is an attempt to connect to Youtube.
At first I thought it might be on of the other ~10 tabs I have open at any given time, but have lately confirmed that the SDMB is doing it by itself. It’s very replicable, and there’s a request to connect to Youtube every time I open a base forum.
I block it as a routine matter on the general principle of “don’t connect to third party sites that have no real connection to the site you’re browsing,” but thought I’d ask here why we do that, so that if it serves some legitimate purpose I can make an exception.
There are a few threads in Cafe Society that have youtube links in the post previews. Depending on your device/browser, your system might try to cache those links just in case you click on them (caching data helps speed up performance a bit).
I did not see anything in IMHO or MPSIMS that was attempting to access youtube on my system.
I turned on Dev tools in Firefox and watched the Network requests, and I see multiple requests going to YouTube, even on the main forum page. A couple appear to be JavaScript stuff, not sure what the rest of it is.
I imagine it’s one of the sites that is allowed to run javascript when accessing the board. I run NoScript, which limits the domains that are allowed to run scripts. I only allow straightdope.com and its subdomains to run scripts when accessing this site. When I run a packet capture on my local machine when accessing the site, I see no requests for youtube.com, just the sites I expect. The next site that is trying to run scripts is google--analytics.com, which seems to be a short path to making youtube.com requests, considering one owns the other.
I don’t mean to sound superior, surfing the internet while limiting scripts can be a total pain in the ass, and I wouldn’t recommend it to folks who weren’t “peculiar”, but a request to youtube.com for a normal page shouldn’t be considered any more disturbing than a request to facebook.com for folks who aren’t accessing that site.
So, I don’t think you can blame the board directly for this request, at least not without more info to convince me.
Firefox lists the sites it is trying to access down in the lower corner of the page.
I’ve never noticed this before, but as Firefox is loading the individual forum directory pages (the ones with just the titles of the posts) “youtube.com” does fly by. This is on the page with just the titles, so I don’t think it would be caching any links to youtube from posts – maybe from ads, but not posts.
I have uBlock Origin running and I still see it. Even more interesting, looking at the network tab, one of the URLs it called looked like a Youtube video link, so I copied it and pasted it into a new tab. It is
For those who don’t want to click, it is a music video from someone in Mayaysia. This came from the list of topics on the ATMB board, not from Cafe Society or anything, and from the topic list, not from a thread. (loading this thread had no Youtube connections). That’s a very strange URL to be putting in.
The individual forum directory pages do not just have the titles of the posts. Go to one of those pages, and hover over the link to a thread, but don’t click it. You’ll see a little box pop up showing the first few lines of the first post. Those first few lines of every thread are part of the forum page, even though they’re not directly visible. But your web browser can see them, and might decide to go check out some of those pages to get a head start just in case you’re going to click on them.
It’s SultanTheme. Turn it on, go to the thread list, reload, and view the page source, search for YouTube. In addition to the thread title, you’ll also see the embedded video link I mention above.
Below that link are also a couple of jpegs that look to be dummy advertisements for Malaysia, so I’m not sure if that bit of code is just meant as an example that is meant to be edited out by board admins before putting into production, or if it’s just an easter egg from a developer who just likes Malaysia.