New York Times and "Statsig"

[pjk]

Recently I've had issues with certain things not working on the NYT website.

Sometimes the account login button that normally appears at the top right of an unauthenticated page session does not appear at all.

And now it re-prompts me for login in order to comment on an article, and even then it doesn't work.

The only new domains I noticed are "prodregistryv2.org" and "featureassets.org" which appear to be part of the "Statsig" analytics platform.

Can anyone give me any insight as to whether the lack of JS permissions for such domains would actually break the site? In my experience with analytics platforms if they are blocked in the browser there are usually no significant user impacts.


Thanks

[barbaz]

I don't know about this specific site because I don't have an account there, sorry.

Speaking generically: if a website is poorly coded, the type of issue you're describing can arise when analytics scripts don't load (regardless of why they don't load - not just user blocking, but also a network error would have the same effect).

You can check in the Chromium developer tools Console for any errors that look related to those scripts missing. But ultimately the only way to be sure is to try allowing the domains while you're logged in and see if the issue persists.

In my experience with analytics platforms if they are blocked in the browser there are usually no significant user impacts.

"usually" yes, but not always.

If you've been using NoScript for years, some of that experience could be because NoScript Classic had surrogate scripts to help mitigate this type of problem (see List of scripts for which NoScript runs surrogates). This feature was permanently removed in NoScript Webext - viewtopic.php?p=103883#p103883