FB posts disappearing
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I'm having a bizarre experience with Facebook on Vivaldi which does not happen on Safari.
Any post which contains the word "sponsored" in the text of either a post or a comment gets hidden. I'm not talking about the ubiquitous Sponsored posts meaning ads in disguise that litter the news feed, I'm talking about posts by individuals which contain the word "sponsored" in the text. These posts usually come up for me in the FB user support group for the browser extension Social Fixer, one of whose features is the blocking of those Sponsored posts; FB broke this feature recently, so this is a topic that appears in the group rather often at the moment.
I can see these posts when they're in the queue awaiting approval. I can see them if I open them up individually using the permalink in the admin activity log. But if I just go to the group, it's as if it's just not there. If I follow a notification about that post, it's also not there.
In one case, this word didn't appear in the post itself, it appeared in a comment I made on the post. When I edited that comment (having hunted down the post permalink and opened it that way) and changed the word to "s.ponsore.d" I could see the post again.
In the latest case, the post was long enough that, once posted in the group, the word "sponsored" wasn't visible at first, because it was behind the "See more..." link. I could see the post until I hit See more to expand it, and as soon as I did that it disappeared.
This happens even when all Vivaldi extensions are disabled, and it doesn't happen at all when I view FB in Safari.
Is it possible that Vivaldi's internal ad-blocking is seeing the word "sponsored" and hiding these posts on the mistaken assumption that they're ads?
Vivaldi 5.4.2753.37 (Stable channel) (x86_64) on macOS Mojave 10.14.6
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@bratsche4 Yes, it’s possible. Disable internal adblocking on Facebook from the shield icon in the address field to confirm your suspicion. That being said, Vivaldi uses third party filter lists in the adblocker. If one of them is the culprit, you would have to find out which one exactly by toggling the lists, checking the list origin and reporting the problem to the maintainers of the list.
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@luetage Thank you, yes, switching from "block trackers and ads" to just "block trackers" makes the post visible again. When I have a moment I'll look for the individual filter list that's the culprit.
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@luetage OK, so it seems to be both "ABP anti-circumvention list" and "EasyList" that are causing the problem. If either of those is enabled and I allow blocking of ads, posts that contain the word "sponsored" in the text of either the post or a comment on the post are hidden. Are you able to tell me how to report this to the maintainers of the lists?
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@bratsche4 EasyList has a github page, you can first search if the issue is already known, but you will need an account to create a new issue ☛ https://github.com/easylist/easylist
Same with the abp list ☛ https://github.com/abp-filters/abp-filters-anti-cv
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@luetage Thank you for all your help!
