56.8 of my visitors don’t see the Instagram images

Hey @wendihihihi,

Thank you for reaching out to us for assistance. When the plugin is working as intended, it will save a local version of the image from Instagram on your server and display it from there instead, which will then no longer cause issues with AdBlockes, or Firefox’s ‘Facebook Container’ feature.

To ensure this is enabled for your plugin, first make sure you have the latest version of the plugin installed, 2.9.1 for the free version. Then, go to Instagram Feed > Customize > Advanced > Scroll down and ensure Favor Local Images and Enable Backup Caching are both enabled, then Save Changes. In the main configuration tab, you will also want to check that you have Check for new posts set to something higher than 1 minute – as ‘1 minute’ will also disable caching. The recommended setting is to check for new posts in the background, every 30 minutes for a feed that is often updated, but higher is better if there aren’t often new posts.

With that being said, Adblocker Plus has custom blocking rules that are not installed by default – some of the more strict ones will block any mention of Instagram or Facebook which would still block parts of our feed. A good example of this, and I just tested with this specific AdBlock plugin, is to check our demo page here – I was able to view the feed without issue and feel free to test on your end. I also checked which setting would block the feed, and the Block social media icons tracking blocks our feed no matter on the setup – incorrectly, as there is not much being served from Instagram directly, except for in the Lightbox, and nothing when the GDPR setting is set to ‘Yes’. For these strict blocker rules, there is nothing that could be done on our part – when set up correctly, the user will only see content from your domain and there should never be a need for that to be blocked. Very few users use these heavy blocking rules and are most often aware of this, and blocking social media content on purpose.

If you could then provide a link to the site in question, I can also help to ensure that posts are being correctly locally served. If you are having further issues with this, let me know and it would also be best for you then to send a support request via our website here, including the System Info from the plugin’s Support tab.

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

With that being said, Adblocker Plus has custom blocking rules that are not installed by default – some of the more strict ones will block any mention of Instagram or Facebook which would still block parts of our feed.

I think your right. It could be that I added some more filters. I don’t know what the default filters are in Adblock Plus.

After trying, I learnt that Fanboy’s Annoyance List is the filter that blocks the images. I need to figure out how many people have installed this filter.

Thanks for putting me in the right direction. Your plugin might be interesting for using it on the site I’m building now.

Cheers

Some more info. It looks like their main aim is to block social media ads.

The whole list is here: https://easylist.to/easylist/fanboy-annoyance.txt

Might be that not many use this filter, especially in the country I am now.

And this filter might block it…

###sb_instagram

Hey @wendihihihi,

Thank you for the additional information here. In this case, the fanboy-annoyance list is directly targeting our plugin, as the #sb_instagram is the main ID for our feed. As such no option in our plugin will prevent this. This means that according to this list, they simply wanted to block all Instagram content, ad or not. In general, most ad blockers do not have these by default and are most often set up by users looking for additional control over their browsing experience.

Likely this list was created before our heavier implementation of our GDPR settings and full image resizing and local storage – previously all images were served from Instagram’s CDN which would give reason to block it. Now, however, users can set up Instagram Feeds without having their users ever connecting to Instagram’s servers. With that said, this specific list seems to block very many, specific things.

Should you have any other questions in the future don’t hesitate to let us know.

Best regards,

Okay, thank you for looking into it @joelsmashballoon. You might be right that most users use the default. I’m going to see what to do next.