Detecting uBlock, SafeScript, etc.

ldoughty
Community Novice


I was curious if any other admins have looked into this and found a solution to detect when a user has script blockers enabled.

Looking at the page code, it seems all the JS code is hosted by cloudfront.net, as well as amazonaws.com. However, Canvas appears to users to run "acceptably" without any of this code. In reality, however, this is not the case. The blocked code has lead to some of our users reporting bugs, putting in tickets, or students failing assignments because their script blockers are not allowing normal behavior. A good specific example is SafeScript and "File upload" assignments. With SafeScript enabled, file uploads fail (with no prompt of success nor failure) if instructure-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com is not white-listed. We also have a vendor who asks us to load a JS file to integrate with Canvas; with script blockers enabled, their extension (which adds a menu item in certain screens) never loads.

Our policy thus far has been to educate users, and let teachers decide to accept late work. But we're at ~8+ third-parties now that students need to white-list (and growing with nearly every LTI tool). A not-insignificant number of our tickets are simply script blocker issues.

I'd love to hear what you all have tried to combat this. I'm really hoping someone has found a way to detect the script blockers and prompt users what to white-list if a JS file fails to load.