This ends up blocking all the static assets I'm trying to test out in our staging environment, not just ads. Particularly since the domain is inaccessible outside of our firewall, I don't think it really serves any public purpose... can it be removed?
As @intense noted, it is our internal staging environment, so there's not really a URL I can give you that will resolve. https://www.stg.nytimes.com/ is the test homepage, but you'll probably just see a 403 from the firewall.
[mention]fanboy[/mention] I would be happy to provide an example, but I'm not sure what else I can do. I have no information as to why it was added in the first place, but I've been working at the Times for almost 9 years and it's always been our internal staging environment.
It's not a login-based firewall, you need a VPN keyfob. What are you trying to verify here, that I am who I say I am? I can send you an email from my work account, if that helps.
Without divulging any of your information I can vouch for you and who you work for. I think [mention]fanboy[/mention] is asking for a test login so he can reproduce the issue you're describing.
Thanks [mention]Lanik[/mention], I just don't have any way of giving him access to our internal site, so I'm not sure how to proceed. This is what it looks like from inside the firewall: http://i.imgur.com/eOfbCRA.png
With ABP (with Block additional tracking enabled, which pulls in the EasyPrivacy list), the page loads, but all the static files on the domain (JS and CSS) are blocked. It all comes down to line 11879 of https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus. ... rivacy.txt.
Well, that sounds like a big screw-up on somebody's part on our side... My guess would be that someone hardcoded the staging hostname by accident. In any event, our story pages have been replatformed onto an entirely new stack from the ground up, and filtering the requests on that page now for "stg" reveals no results, so I would submit that whatever fluke caused it to surface on a production page has passed.
Just to follow up... The stg domain is no longer requested from the article that [mention]Khrin[/mention] referenced, nor so far as I can tell any other production page on our www domain. I'm not sure exactly what guidelines led to it being added (e.g., the precise relationship between the content and the summary of the commit), but I submit that it has been at the least made obsolete by changes on our site.