InformAction Forums

Hi,

I frequently read the news at www.salon.com and their auto-refresh drives me crazy. My most common method of reading a series of articles is to scroll down the main page and every time I see a headline for an article I want to read, open it in a new tab, read it there, then close that tab so I immediately go back to the main page at the point where I left off. However, Salon refreshes automatically about every 5 minutes or so, so most of the time that you come back, it's refreshed, and it doesn't even take you back to where you left off, instead you're at the top (for me at least - I also use AdBlock Plus and I think this might interfere with them returning you to your old position).

I tried disabling the html refresh tag through the Firefox about:config key accesibility.blockautorefresh but that did not work, so they're presumably using some other method. On several other forums, I saw NoScript recommended as a way to block Java based auto-refreshes, but I can't figure out what, if any, of the scripts on Salon's main page is doing the auto-refresh.

Has anyone blocked this before? Or does anyone who's more experienced with NoScript have a moment to check this out for me and provide some insight?

Thanks!

Depending on how they're doing it ...

NoScript | Options | Advanced -> Forbid META redirections inside <NOSCRIPT> elements
or
in Mozilla itself, about:config, accessibility.blockautorefresh


(Both may have unwanted side effects, IOW affecting things that you'd rather not. If you know you're on Salon, you can jump into NoScript, make the change then revert it when finished at Salon...)

Hi therube,

I tried your first suggestion, and it does stop their auto-refresh (good!) but having Salon as an Untrusted site also disables a lot of other functionality on the site that I don't want to disable. For example, it stops rendering of most of the article images aside from the first article at the top of the page.

Is there a way to set up No Script so that for Untrusted sites (for which I'll only be listing Salon), it actually does nothing except Forbid META redirections?

Thanks for your time.

PS: I had already tried setting accessibility.blockautorefresh to true in Firefox and that did not help.

slickity wrote: Is there a way to set up No Script so that for Untrusted sites (for which I'll only be listing Salon), it actually does nothing except Forbid META redirections?

No, I'm afraid not. If a site is not trusted, then JavaScript will be blocked - by definition.

PS: I had already tried setting accessibility.blockautorefresh to true in Firefox and that did not help.

Salon.com doesn't seem to be using a 'meta' tag to do the refresh, so that setting won't affect it. It must be using JavaScript - in which case, there really isn't a simple way to allow their necessary JavaScript while blocking that one.

If someone wants to investigate and isolate the exact function that they're using to reload the page, then you might be able to stop it using the 'Controle de Scripts' addon.