Do not proxy this site is not respected

lenejohansen
Hey!

First of all, thank you for an awesome product. I love Zotero and I do recommend it to ALL my students.

However, there is a thing that has been annoying me for several weeks now. The Zotero Connector automatically proxies the sites it can proxy, which saves me several steps so this is great. There are some websites I do not want it to proxy, such as Politico.com and Politico.eu, as well as my dictionary database. Politico does not need a login, and I have access to the dictionary database through a non-university user.

Zotero Connector usually posts a yellow line on top of the screen when it gets to websites it would like to proxy, as it does with these websites. However, I have to click Do not proxy this site multiple times for the same page every time I go in. The dictionary-tab is always open and sometimes I get in there and there is the logon screen for my university, because Zotero Connector has proxied it again.

I tried checking if I could edit the Do not proxy-list in the Zotero Connector settings, just as I can the Proxy-list, but there was no such section. Is there something I am missing here, because this is stealing a lot of time.

Thanks.

Lene Johansen
  • adomasven Zotero Team
    If you're navigating to Politico from your university proxied websites that automatically take you to e.g. politico.com.proxy.institution.edu, Zotero will re-proxy the host. If you want Zotero to not do that automatically you can uncheck "Automatically associate new hosts" under your university proxy settings in the Zotero Connector. Do note that you will still get the login screen when navigating from university proxied resources to Politico. The Connector does not have a mechanism to prevent sites from being proxied.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    @lenejohansen: Right, to clarify, this is really an issue with your university website offering to proxy the site in the first place. You should ask them not to rewrite URLs that don't need to be proxied. You can also, of course, just avoid clicking on such sites from your university website and go to them directly.

    We do recommend leaving "Automatically associate new hosts" enabled in general. if you remove Politico from the list of hosts and are careful not to click through from your university website, this won't happen again.
  • lenejohansen
    I am not going to these sites via the university website, ever.

    The message that comes up in the browers is from the Zotero Connector.

    I dug around in options and managed to edit away these sites in the config editor. I will see if this resolves the problem.

    However, it would still be great if we were allowed to have an editable Do not proxy-list in the settings.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    If the sites were listed in the proxy settings, you accessed them via the proxy at least once. That's the only way for something to end up there. The Connector obviously doesn't just mark random sites for proxying — it does so the first time you connect to them through the proxy.
  • dstillman Zotero Team
    edited October 20, 2021
    Note that, depending on the university's proxy configuration, you might have followed a link from another site that was being proxied. If the proxy server rewrites some or all links on a proxied site, and one was to Politico, that could result in your accessing Politico once via the proxy.

    It doesn't really make sense for the Connector to have a configurable list of sites not to proxy, because sites that don't need to be proxied should never be proxied by the proxy in the first place.
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