EasyList Forum

I was recently looking through the forums and was reminded of the issues with the filter ||clustrmaps.com^$third-party, which have previously been discussed at http://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?t=4476 and http://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?t=4745. The issue originates from the code that is embedded in pages that use the service: This essentially means that the page will attempt to load the tracker and, if it fails, will repeatedly attempt to load http://www2.clustrmaps.com/images/clust ... k-soon.jpg until the request is successful. The obvious flaw is that Adblock Plus will always refuse such connections and that the page will therefore perpetually attempt to retrieve the image, resulting in excessive CPU usage. An example of a domain where this issue arises is http://notalwaysright.com/.

The current policy is that EasyList and EasyPrivacy only include whitelists when websites would be unusable without such filters, a situation that appears to have arisen in this instance. I would therefore propose the addition of @@||clustrmaps.com/images/clustrmaps-back-soon.jpg$image,third-party to the subscription, which will not only resolve the issue, but does not appear to result in any tracking being protected; the actual counter, http://www3.clustrmaps.com/counter/index2.php?url=[site name], will still be blocked by the current filters.

Personally I haven't touched the clustrmaps stuff, too many issues, little gain.

I'm fine with an escalation approach. Let's try your whitelist first and see how it works. If the problems should persist I opt removing the filter altogether as I consider abnormal CPU usage a serious bug caused by EasyList.

Added (https://hg.adblockplus.org/easylist/rev/95361b2675a7)

Note that this issue has been reported to Clustrmaps in May 2008 and fixed back then (https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2380). However, since that particular piece of code is copied into page source it needs to be updated for each website. Some sites still didn't bother apparently.