Irritating tool bar?

[ghmerrill]

A little while ago this irritating tool bar (with items for Facebook, Twitter, Email, Print, and "More Options") started appearing on my forum pages. I have absolutely no desire to use any of the functions on it, and it obscures the upper left-hand portion of any thread window.

Under certain conditions (but not others!) a mouse-over in the right place will expose a "hide" possibility. But right now (as I type this message), I can't get that to appear.

How can I switch this thing off permanently? Is it a new "feature", or just something I never triggered previously?

[RickF]

I'm not seeing any new toolbar Gary. Are you sure you didn't download something recently that may have added that toolbar? This is what I'm seeing right now...

[davewerden]

I just took that bar off and put back the old one (horizontal). I'm not sure, but I THINK something changed with the vertical widget - at least, I thought it used to stay out of the way better. Anyway, I agree with Gary in that it was getting in the way. I've noticed that for only the last week or so, even though the vertical bar had been there for maybe a couple months. One of the joys of using a 3rd-party tool.

[carbogast]

I also noticed the vertical toolbar sometime this week, and yes, it was very annoying. Today, the horizontal is back and it is much better behaved.

[ghmerrill]

Um ... good point. I've looked at the source code for the pages, and this looks like something inserted by Add This (http://www.addthis.com/) in Chrome. Not sure how it got there. Also, not sure how it's getting there since it's not in my Chrome extensions. So at this point I'm not sure if it's actually in my browser or on Dave's server. Also, this is the ONLY site for which I have this problem. The large vertical tool bar has now gone away in favor of a very small one. Here's what it looks like:The code in the page looks like, and you can see the little bar above the "Reply to Thread" button:And the code in the page follows below. Note the explicit reference in it to

src="//s7.addthis.com/js/300/addthis_widget.js#pubid=dwerden"

This kind of makes it look like its being inserted on the server side. Maybe Dave will know what the story is.

[davewerden]

Gary - please see my response above.

AddThis is a little widget I have on the main site and the forum. It gives users an easy way to share pages on social media, and it gives me reporting on what pages are shared most often. It's a good overview for me about the usefulness and typical use of the site.

Note that the reporting I get is not tied to any users' individually. It is cumulative data. So I don't see what pages Gary or Rick like, for example; I see what pages are most popular among all users collectively.

[ghmerrill]

One I saw the little bar, I suspected you had quickly made a change . I certainly don't mind the little bar there, and your collecting whatever information is helpful to you. The big vertical bar was just a blob that (in Chrome at least) overlay a chunk of the Title box and stuff underneath that.

Some of this is probably browser specific, and so if you don't test in every (reasonable) browser, it's easy to miss something odd in one of those.

Rick's suggestion scared me for a moment because I had just last night -- through a moment of carelessness -- managed to download something that installed a bunch of adware on my system. I'm normally VERY careful about that, but some of these things are quite tricky in how they piggyback on genuine application installations. By the time I realized what was happening, it had installed itself in all my browsers and it took me a half hour to hunt down its evil spawn and expunge them. But then when I saw the source for the pages generated here, and that it wasn't in my browser extensions, I figured it was being inserted on the server side.

Thanks.

[RickF]

"Rick's suggestion scared me for a moment because I had just last night -- through a moment of carelessness -- managed to download something that installed a bunch of adware on my system."

Sorry Gary, but I didn't see anything additional on the forum is why I thought it might have been specific to your browser. Yeah, I think we've all been there before getting unwanted adware at times.