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Comment by palerdot | Hacker News Reader

Weird. I cannot star this repo in github with my ad blocker (u block origin) turned on. Apparently, the star request sends a request to this end point - https://www.google-analytics.com/collect which fails, which results in a github error saying "You cannot perform this action at this time".

Everything works fine, when adblocker was turned off in the page. Any ideas on why this behaviour?

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That request being blocked is fine.

The error is due to the star POST request on Github being blocked. The endpoint in question is https://github.com/googleanalytics/autotrack/star. Your ad blocker uses string matching to block URLs and sees "googleanalytics" (the repository name) in there and blocks it.

Thanks for the explanation. I'm still taken aback by Github's behaviour to communicate with outside apis for their internal star operation.

That's not what is happening. Your ad blocker thinks so because the URL contains a string it mistrusts, is all.

if you use any kind of 3rd party analytics service you need to communicate with outside api basically every (analytically relevant) action of your user... so it's pretty standard on web and native apps alike

If that is the case, why all the other the other repo's star operations is not communicated to google or other analytics platform? My point was, I was blocked from starring only for this repo and not all the other repos. It was not about how analytics works in general for every user action.

A sibilling comment was explaining it: basically your ublock (that I use too) is regularly blocking the request to google analytics everywhere, github code doesn't fail in that case, but since the repo contained the "googleanalytics" substring ublock was blocking the request (because it checks for words in the urls that get requested) to the github server thus making the starring function fail.

Other repo do not have "suspicious" strings in their url, so they pass through ublock, while the real google analytics call is blocked and github does not fail. You can check the network tab in the developer tools in chrome around github and see that calls to GA gets blocked and calls to github pass while on that specific page also the call to github fails

This explains a lot, thank you :)

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