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To speed up the load time of our site, we defer the loading of some scripts. This has been working fine until a couple of days ago. I've boiled the issue down to this short page of HTML.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
    <head>
        <script type="text/javascript" 
            src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.4/jquery.js">
        </script>
        <script type="text/javascript">
            //<![CDATA[
                var scriptUrl = "http://ads.trafficspaces.net/v1.22/adservice.js";
                jQuery
                    .getScript(
                        scriptUrl, 
                        function () {
                            alert("I'm never called")
                        });
            //]]>
        </script>
    </head>
    <body>
    </body>
</html>

It would appear that the script in question is served with a text/plain content type. I'm not sure what it was before the weekend. Could this be the problem?

Looking in Fiddler, it appears the request is never made, but I can fetch it when I paste the URL into another tab. If I change scriptUrl to one under my control, it works fine. What's going on?

spender
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    Works for me :) http://jsbin.com/olevi4 – Nick Craver Dec 06 '10 at 20:40
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    Lightbulb moment. AdBlockPro. Grrr. – spender Dec 06 '10 at 20:41
  • Thanks @Nick. Your confirmation that it worked instantly brought me to the right conclusion. I switched on ABP because I was working remotely and animated adverts over RDP make it unusable. Silly me. The upside is that it's brought a not too uncommon case that needs dealing with in a more robust way. Thanks again. – spender Dec 06 '10 at 20:48
  • added a few things to check in an answer below...I guarantee someone finds this later and has the same eureka moment :) – Nick Craver Dec 06 '10 at 20:52
  • Yep. I deleted the question, then undeleted because it's been a painful hour of feeling stupid. If this helps the next person who cleverly tries to develop advert functionality while using an ad blocker then I thought it should remain! – spender Dec 06 '10 at 20:59

1 Answers1

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Check your addons/extensions and such, make sure that the ad script itself isn't being blocked by some other filter(ad blocker extension, proxy filter, etc).

It works for me, you can test it here - I'm testing in chrome with no ad blocker.

Nick Craver
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