Bug (and fix) for renewing a data plan.

[mhoye]

Hi, everyone -

When I've used up all my Public Mobile data plan, I can still connect to the Public Mobile self-serve site to renew it even though the rest of the internet is no longer visible from my device. That's a useful feature, but at the moment it doesn't work - trying to log into the service from the data-constrained device times out while I attempt to log in. I've confirmed this behavior on iOS and Windows.

The cause of this timeout is that the self-serve page now relies on two external resources - one at use.typekit.net and one at fonts.googleapis.com - neither of which appear to be similarly whitelisted for access in a no-data-plan situation. Normally the GoogleAPIs link returns immediately, and the Typekit link returns a 404 error, but because they're not whitelisted they take a long time for those connections to time out, which causes the login process to time out as well.

By using developer tools to block those connections, but allowing the rest of the self-serve page to load, I was able to log in and top up my data plan successfully. On a desktop machine those developer tools are built into Firefox - hit F12 - and if you look at the "network" tab you can right-click the typekit and googleapis URLs and block them; reloading the page will be immediately successful.

I'm not sure where to report this, so here it is. If there's a better place for me to put it I'm happy to do that.

- mhoye

[mhoye]

Thanks, all. I've messaged the moderators with a link.

[srlawren]

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@mhoye wrote:

When I've used up all my Public Mobile data plan, I can still connect to the Public Mobile self-serve site to renew it even though the rest of the internet is no longer visible from my device.

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@mhoye this is an interesting revelation.  I know a few years back when people were asking for access to the self-serve site over mobile data to be zero-rated, we were told that PM was not allowed to do this due to net neutrality regulations.  I wonder if that has changed, or if this is something unintentional (Lord knows, there are a ton of things that work contrary to how it's officially stated/documented).  Thanks for mentioning this, and for the workaround.  Hopefully it will be helpful to someone in the future.

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@geopublic wrote:

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@mhoye  Great post.

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@geopublic hey then why not give it a bravo?  🙂

[GinYVR]

@mhoyeYou can always drop a line to the moderators.

[geopublic]

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@mhoye wrote:

Hi, everyone -

When I've used up all my Public Mobile data plan, I can still connect to the Public Mobile self-serve site to renew it even though the rest of the internet is no longer visible from my device. That's a useful feature, but at the moment it doesn't work - trying to log into the service from the data-constrained device times out while I attempt to log in. I've confirmed this behavior on iOS and Windows.

The cause of this timeout is that the self-serve page now relies on two external resources - one at use.typekit.net and one at fonts.googleapis.com - neither of which appear to be similarly whitelisted for access in a no-data-plan situation. Normally the GoogleAPIs link returns immediately, and the Typekit link returns a 404 error, but because they're not whitelisted they take a long time for those connections to time out, which causes the login process to time out as well.

By using developer tools to block those connections, but allowing the rest of the self-serve page to load, I was able to log in and top up my data plan successfully. On a desktop machine those developer tools are built into Firefox - hit F12 - and if you look at the "network" tab you can right-click the typekit and googleapis URLs and block them; reloading the page will be immediately successful.

I'm not sure where to report this, so here it is. If there's a better place for me to put it I'm happy to do that.

- mhoye

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@mhoye  Great post. My suggestion is to message the moderator team and ask them to forward you message to the appropriate department for consideration. Good job!

To contact Public Mobile click here. The link  sends you to the private message function and adds the moderator team as recipient for a private message. You just have to enter a title and text in the body of the message describing the problem and post. The message will be received by the moderator team and they will respond to it. You will receive the response in your private message inbox.

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