Bag Of Tricks Vol. 21: Avoiding The ARC Frame On The Official Forum

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Welcome to the latest installment of our Bag of Tricks! On some days you will find useful tricks, gimmicks and ideas here that can make life in Neverwinter Online easier. Some of the stuff should be well known, but since even veterans learn something new every now and then, chance is you can, too.

This is a repost of of a Bag of Tricks volume that originally was published on December 21, 2015. In the light of the recently introduced dev tracker, we thought it can’t hurt to bring this up again.

One of the major annoyances since porting the official forum to the Vanilla software has been that you can’t access it without the ARC frame. It’s unnecessary clunky and lengthens loading times. In case you try the direct forum URL without the frame, you are being redirected.

Custom.js Kicks Us To Arcgames

The PWE Enhancement Plugin for Tamper/Greasemonkey had been a good workaround, which included the functionality to block the automatic forwards. It is no longer being maintained since quite some time however, so players are once again forced to live with the ARC frame. The guilty party is a javascript located inside custom.js.

function clearBackground() {
    var framed = (window.location != window.parent.location) ? true : false;
    if(framed) {
     	$('body').css('background', "transparent");
    } else {
		// if not framed, kick them to arcgames
		var loc = window.location.pathname;
		var s = loc.split('/');
		s[1] = s[1] + "?byNode=true#";
		var uri = s.join('/');
		var domain = "http://www.arcgames.com";
		var url = domain + '/en/forums' + uri;
		window.location.href = url;
	}
}

This function is called at the start of the forum page, checks whether you are using the framed version and if not, well “kick them to arcgames”.

Block the Javascript Manually

You still have the option to block the custom.js (filter url: forum.arcgames.com/neverwinter/themes/Arc/js/custom.js*) manually, for example using your Adblock or a similar plugin. That unfortunately also kills the dev tracker since the file includes a necessary slideshow plugin. That’s why we have prepared a Tamper/Greasemonkey userscript that fully reinjects all the custom.js functionality minus the redirect. Just get the extension for FireFox or Chrome and install the userscript by clicking the link.

As you can see it’s a little bit of a mess to get rid of the redirect without breaking other parts of the forum. It would certainly be better if PWE offered a way to use the forum without the ARC frame. But since that’s not likely to happen, we have you covered!


Monday’s Bag Of Tricks Vol. 16: Playing the Neverwinter Astral Diamond Exchange
Monday’s Bag Of Tricks Vol. 17: Managing Cryptic’s Account Guard
Monday’s Bag Of Tricks Vol. 18: Unrepentant Gaming’s Stronghold Calculator
Monday’s Bag Of Tricks Vol. 19: Neverwinter VIP Pays For Itself
Monday’s Bag Of Tricks Vol. 20: Neverwinter Standalone Version


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