Runaway download on chess.com main page

Browser: Opera 47.0.2631.71, developer tools toggled on

System: Mac OS X 10.12.6 64-bit

Reproducible on a non-premium account, plain V3 (no beta).

Baseline network activity summary after turning on the Opera's built-in ad blocker, and clearing the browsing data other than the passwords and cookies: 59 requests, 757kB transferred, DOM content loaded in 1.78 sec, finished loading the page in 2.28 seconds.

So far so good.

Now unblock the ads, reload the page. While the page reloads reasonably quickly, it keeps downloading something without any visible effect. about 2 minutes later, the cooling fan comes on and my macbook is getting hot. There seems to be no way to stop the incoming data (the relevant control in Opera flickers between X and reload symbol).

After about 4 minutes, the network summary indicates having handled some 6,300 requests, and about 32 MB downloaded.

After another 4 minuters, the request count is about 12,300, with 46.4 MB transferred; the largest pieces of data are https://www.hbd-cm.com/vid/These_sisters_convinced_the_Bali_govt_to_ban_plastic_bags.mp4 (twice!), https://www.hbd-cm.com/vid/Meet_The_Creator_Of_Coconut_Jerky_Startup.mp4, and some other video crud that was not even visible in my window.

Somewhat disturbingly, opera indicates having blocked content from insecure sources. Looking at the console log, it mostly complains about http requests that should've been served via https, but since there are about 1300 errors reported, it is not clear whether that's all that is to it...

Seriously, guys, this kind of uncontrollable bandwidth hijacking is not acceptable...

sounds like your computer is infected with malware.. how about some screenshots lulz

Thanks for playing, but there is no malware on my computers.

Much better today (I am guessing that someone must have seen my first post and fixed the darn thing, or maybe it got discovered and fixed independently -- it was impossible to miss once the adblocker got disabled).

if it's impossible to miss, how come it's been there all this time? We're talking 2 years, near as damn it...

This was the first time I disabled AdBlocker in more than 2 years...

yeah, but staff musta known all along...

Not if they are paranoid in setting up their browsers for maximal protection of privacy:

• Block third-party cookies and data
• Deny location services
• Send "do not track" requests
• Activate AdBlocker
• ... et.c

Not all browsers support everything on this list, and I might have missed something -- would have to review settings on all four browsers I use (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome).

actually all of our ads are served by third party vendors, so we don't always know....

If this happens again, you can report the ad here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe9etv6NejRpesC5-CXUbHj2WTGl2oDH3zRAHOgAeTpTYmvAA/viewform?c=0&w=1

do you mean that when another organisation pays for advertising here you have no control over it?

we have control, but by default the vendors just include various ads to my knowledge. we can from there delete or block an ad!

Tyler, that link is for reporting a single ad. The problem is not just a single ad, but many of them, and it is just about impossible to determine which one is responsible for thousands of GET requests and dozens of megabytes.

I have some screenshots, will post tomorrow (it is past midnight for me right now...)

Are you still seeing any of these? They should be blocked!

this block didn't happen yesterday, by any chance?

Yes, the runaway downloads still occur in the same scenario, where the AdBlock is disabled and third-party cookies and site data allowed. Here's a screenshot after keeping chess.com home page open about 100 seconds, with no interaction.

Notice the vertical purplish line to the left of the 10000ms mark (vertically below the big red dot): this is when the visible content has finished loading (in about 1.5 seconds). Everything else is advertisements, all of which are located in the part of the window that does not even show up. Also note that loading all this junk produced 177 errors and 156 warnings.

Disabling the AdBlock and disallowing third-party cookies and site data produces a slightly different picture: fewer requests (but some of them were huge files, hence more data) and bursts of download activity. Still, way too much stuff, IMO.

Note that the above were done using a basic account, not a premium one. On my normal account, the operation is much faster. Below is a snapshot of the complete window -- the same I used to make the previous screen caps. Note that no content below the daily puzzle is showing, so loading any ads is pointless, since they would not be seen anyway.

Opera's AdBlocker is a bit aggressive, so it also disallowed any analytics and blocked three items.

The bottom line is that basic users are getting serious megabytes of data shoved down their browsers, and this definitely may have detrimental impact on the perceived performance. To add insult to injury, a lot of that traffic includes apparently erroneous data (or at least data that Opera reports as erroneous). The good news is that I have not seen any blocking of "insecure sources" today.

Some premium users also reported seeing ad-related traffic in their browsers (although ads were not displayed). Personally, I could not reproduce the latter (or maybe it got fixed).

We are looking into this ASAP

Update: the situation is slightly better but still way too much of data. Here's a typical report of network activity, under conditions mentioned in post #15 (AdBlock is disabled and third-party cookies and site data allowed), on a basic account.

There are several periods of low activity (good!), with periods of high activity (yuck!) and  one prolonged avalanche of data (double yuck & barf!!!).

As before, I have resized the window (prior to the test) to ensure that no ads would be visible - just the header of the page, some statistics, and the puzzle. The content that was actually displayed in the window, which I kept stable (no resizing or scrolling, my mouse never even entered that window) took about 2 seconds to display and maybe 700kB to transfer.

Please guys, the content that does not show up should NOT be loaded. Could you perhaps avoid all ads that include auto-playing movies? I imagine that most people don't want any streaming content unless they click on it...