Mood selector doesn't work with Gecko-based browsers

Apparently, the mood selector doesn't work with Firefox or other Gecko-based browsers (I tried Firefox 2.0.x.x and Epiphany).

When I click on the icon, the drop-down list DIV-tag is displayed, but apparently, the event handler doesn't work (changing selection by clicking on it has no effect).

 

OK, I opened the error console in Firefox, and this is what is displayed (see attachment).

Apparently, the event handler is called, but the AJAX code is not allowed to make a connection to the remote server (an error message to the user would be nice in such cases, along with a possible solution ).

It could be that the problem is the Gecko-typical domain problem, i.e. the domain for the AJAX XML request does not match the domain used for serving the page. ("http://forums.aliensoup.com/ajax.php" instead of "http://www.aliensoup.com/forums/ajax.php"?)

 

Just FYI, the mood selector is working just fine for me in Firefox 2.0.0.14.

 

The mood selector is working just fine for me with Firefox 2.0.0.12

 

Thanks!! I guess it's just FreeBSD's security paranoia ... I haven't tried it on Ubuntu yet ... (or, perhaps it's just a browser security setting that's on by default on FreeBSD ... )

EDIT ... ok, now I've tried it on Ubuntu 8.04, and get the same result:
FreeBSD 7.0 w/ Firefox 2.0.0.12
Ubuntu Linux 8.04 w/ Firefox 3.0b5

I'm not sure about the security considerations involved in this, the reason why XMLHttpRequest.open() in this case is refused with "access denied".

 

You wouldn't happen to be attemping this from the front news/portal page, would you? It IS currently not functioning there but it DOES work from within the other areas at least on the platforms I test on...

Hmm.

 

On which platforms did you test it? Back when my Windows was still running, I was using Vista with IE 7, and it worked the way you described it (not on the portal page, but on the other pages).

On Linux and FreeBSD, it doesn't work on any page, though I have not tried it on the portal page yet. It could be that the PHP script analyzes the browser string and omits some essential part of script on these platforms for some obscure reason (like, "this feature doesn't exist on this platform", despite it does), or something.

I looked at the page source yesterday, and I identified the JavaScript function causing the problem as "change_mood(mood)" near line 189. Apparently the vB_AJAX_Handler object is created, but the send() call fails when it ultimately results in an open() call on the XMLHttpRequest object that is probably contained within the vB_AJAX_Handler object.