PSA for CloudFlare users

[TPerry]

Do yourself a favor.. never be tempted to enable Rocket (EXP)Loader, no matter how beneficial it sounds. For several years it has had a tendency to cause various issues on XenForo.

 

[briansol]

xf already puts the scripts it can at the bottom. putting the ones up top at the bottom too (what rocket loader does) causes the issue.

 

[TPerry]

One of the biggest issues that is has historically caused is in the editor the disappearance of your "buttons". Back "in the day" of 1.2/1.3 it was so prevalent and I mentioned it so often some folks here ribbed me about finding it on the sites that reported issues as it was one of the first things I checked for when reading an editor issue help post.

 

[digitalpoint]

Do yourself a favor.. never be tempted to enable Rocket (EXP)Loader, no matter how beneficial it sounds. For several years it has had a tendency to cause various issues on XenForo.

Yes.

heh yeah, I didn't even try Rocket Loader... just seemed like a horrible idea to me.

The other thing I've seen people do is try to enable crazy beta features like Rocket Loader and then they wonder why their site is messed up when Rocket Loader is going in and mucking with the site's JavaScript. lol Maybe useful for basic sites, but not for complex ones like XF.

Truthfully, even if it worked (not sure if it does since I've never enabled it), Rocket Loader is a terrible idea for use with XenForo.

The whole premise of Rocket Loader is that CloudFlare is going to go in and rewrite how your JavaScript works on your site because you think CloudFlare can do a better job at optimizing JavaScript in your application (XenForo) better than XenForo developers can.

It's just a really bad idea. If you want to change something with how you load JavaScript, do it yourself so you have an understanding of what you are doing. Don't rely on Rocket Loader to understand your application better than the application developers.

...

Rocket Loader probably isn't as great as you are hoping for XenForo. For starters, there's nothing magic about it... it can't somehow make JavaScript load better/faster than a good developer can do on their own. It's really more a "patch" of sorts for poorly designed websites where site owners don't know how (or can't) fix their issues on their own. If you look at XenForo's page source, JavaScript files are already loading at the end of the page, so asyncing them isn't going to do much of anything because they are already the last thing to load (nothing to block at that point). Again, Rocket Loader is intended as a patch for poorly designed frameworks/websites (which XenForo isn't).

Rocket Loader sucks... Remember, Rocket Loader doesn't do some sort of magic that isn't possible to code yourself if you know what you are doing, so it's usefulness is limited to improving poorly written systems. XenForo is not a poorly written system, so even if it "worked" with XenForo, you really aren't able to improve much of anything. Again, it's not magic... the best it can do is try to rewrite poorly written code.

Rocket Loader is such a bad idea with XenForo, I can't stop saying it. Been saying it for almost 10 years now. I went so far as to flat out label it as "bad setting" in my Cloudflare add-on if someone enables it.

 

[Mendalla]