Mystery of the broken message editor

By popular request:

My financial website saga…

So far it appears to concern only the website’s message editor.

A new message can’t be sent from the messaging screen.

The ‘Subject’ line on the message editor screen is supposed to offer a menu of dropdown selections, but the only option that appears is this string: “abcd” (without the quotes).

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The ‘Send’ button is also greyed-out, so even if a message is composed with “abcd” as the ‘subject’ the message can’t be sent.

Yet to be determined why this is happening.

Occurs in BRAVE but does not occur in CHROME. The latter displays the normal menu of choices in the dropdown and allows a message to be sent normally. (This isn’t an advertisement for CHROME, tho.)

Quite the engrossing saga! Lets continue!

One thing I notice is that a lot of times when text or menus won’t/don’t appear, it’s because of some canvasing technique used by the website getting blocked (as expected) by Fingerprinting Protection in Shields.

Is it safe to assume this happens with Shields both up and down?
You’re using Dev iirc? Does it work in beta/release build?

Brilliant sleuthing. Fixed with the flip of an up/down switch. (I’m in Dev v.0.58.10 (on a Mac).)

Seems odd that it would affect only website messaging (but what do I know).

Does changing the setting mean that Shields are permanently down for that website now or is it something that has to be enabled proactively? (I recall being advised to disable 3rd Party Fingerprinting to get Call Phones From GMail to work a few months ago. That setting change didn’t persist. Also looks like ‘fingerprinting’ – the word at least – has since been dropped. Now called ‘recognition’?)

I’d like to understand shields, fingerprinting/recognition, scripts, etc. better. Are these explained in any detail somewhere at brave.com?

Thanks!

@mk7z, great questions! And well timed too - I actually just answered a very similar topic here on Community that I think will be useful for you:

Let me know if anything is still unclear.

Thanks. I’ve read through what you wrote in the linked thread but will want to review it several times.

In the meantime, are particular disabling/enabling options recommended for specific issues?

That is, I assume the least desirable option is to choose Shields ‘down,’ since that disables all protections.

For my issue (with the fin’l website), could I instead have used trial-&-error with each category of options displayed when the Shields icon is selected (i.e., the 5 categories under the webpage identifier) to avoid disabling any I didn’t need to?

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Yes, this is exactly right. As I stated in the other thread posted above, I plan take a deep-dive into Shields with the Support article I’m currently composing that should cover all questions like the one’s you’re asking.

But generally speaking, when a website breaks, won’t load, refuses to log you in, won’t stop refreshing, buffering, etc - the first two troubleshooting steps you should perform are:

  1. Turn Shields down (entirely, big-switch in panel). Did this fix your issue?
    • If yes, we now know that some protection in Shields is blocking an item(s) required for the site to properly function or display. From here, go to step 2.
    • If not, perform step two on Global Shields settings. If this doesn’t work, it’s probably not directly related to Shields protections. Heavy emphasis on “probably” but this is a very good indicator of what’s happening under the hood and rules out several possibilities off the bat.
  2. If you’re here, Shields down fixed the issue. From here, turn Shields back on and adjust each setting and note what changes when the page reloads. You’ll often fix the issue with one of these toggled on/off appropriately. Since there aren’t that many options in the panel, trial and error method shouldn’t take long.

As for your other question:

Yes, there is an answer to this. If I have time to write this out today I’ll come back and do so, but thank you for bringing it up. I’ll be sure to include a section about this as I write the actual support article.

Hope this helps.

I’m going to go ahead and close this thread for now. If you have questions about anything I responded to here, or the Shields breakdown in the previous thread, go ahead and create a new topic (Feedback is probably a good cat. to put it in), make the title something like “How shields work” or “what are the different shields functions”, etc and tag me in it (maybe link to this thread and the one posted above as well) with your questions.

It’ll be more helpful and visible to others if the discussion happens in a topic directly related to the discussion itself.

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