What is meta? ×  When winterba.sh is blocked by over zealous
network administrators the sites are unusable.  Pages time out
or take a very long time to load.  You can't even opt out of the
hats as that requires opening a page from winterba.sh.  Posted
on behalf of Thomas Owens who is suffering at the moment.
share|improve this question  1 Answer 1  up vote 13 down vote
accepted  It wasn't winterba.sh itself being blocked that was
the problem, but cdn.prom.sstatic.net (our promo CDN subdomain).
That's where the Winter Bash JavaScript file is loaded from.
This file was loaded synchronously and thus blocking, which
should almost always be avoided, especially when loading
something peripheral like this, where synchronous loading is
unnecessary. The domain being actively blocked made this fairly
obvious, but it had a performance impact for all users.  The
script is now being loaded asynchronously everywhere, so the
timeout when trying to load the JS file isn't going to impact
the rest of the functionality.  shar