GT500.org Blog

I was on YouTube earlier today, and videos were loading too slowly for me to watch them. I decided it was time to do what I always do when this happens, and I headed to SourceForge to grab WinMTR and get a log to send to Google. Normally they are pretty quick about resolving issues like that after receiving an MTR log, however after running WinMTR for a while and getting my log ready to send, I went to YouTube only to find that the "Report a bug" button at the bottom of every page was missing. After a while of searching YouTube Help and Google, I was still without an answer, so I decided to take a look at the source code for the page. This is what I found:

      <ul id="footer-links-secondary">
        <li><a href="/t/terms">Terms</a></li>
        <li><a href="http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/">Privacy</a></li>
        <li><a href="//support.google.com/youtube/bin/request.py?contact_type=abuse&amp;hl=en-US">Safety</a></li>
        <li><a href="//www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/error.html" onclick="return yt.www.feedback.start(yt.getConfig('FEEDBACK_LOCALE_LANGUAGE'), yt.getConfig('FEEDBACK_LOCALE_EXTRAS'));" id="reportbug">Report a bug</a></li>
        <li><a href="/testtube">Try something new!</a></li>
      </ul>

Well, there's the link right there in the source code, so why isn't the link in the page like it's supposed to be? I fired up Opera's DragonFly thingy to take a look at the CSS, and guess what I found? After selecting the link so that DragonFly would only display the CSS that was directly applied to that link, I saw the following at the top of the list:

 element.style { 
  display: none;
 }

Not much below that in the list, I also found the following:

 .hid { 
  display: none;
 }

Well, that explained why the link wasn't showing up. Edit: Just to add to the info above, DragonFly reported the HTML for the link as being the following:

<a href="//www.google.com/tools/feedback/intl/en/error.html" onclick="return yt.www.feedback.start(yt.getConfig('FEEDBACK_LOCALE_LANGUAGE'), yt.getConfig('FEEDBACK_LOCALE_EXTRAS'));" id="reportbug" style="" class="hid">Report a bug</a>

I disabled these two lovely little gems I found in the CSS, and suddenly the link appeared on the page! Well, YouTube, I guess I will be reporting a bug today after all.