How to Remove the Chat Widget While Watching NASCAR RaceBuddy or Media Center

If you’re like me, you could probably careless about the social media chat widget thing that is to the right of the NASCAR RaceBuddy and/or Media Center video streams. I do my chatting in a separate Twitter tab within the browser or a separate Twitter application such as TweetDeck. Not only is the chat in these widgets less than desirable at times, but it also seems to cause the video streams to constantly lag and start/stop when the chat widget updates and scrolls items down/up. This is the primary reason I decided to see if I could stop the chat widget from loading in the browser. You can always move or resize the browser window to hide it if that’s all you want to do.

My main browser is Firefox (version 10.0.2 as of this writing) within Windows XP Home/SP3 and this is what I did: After poking around in the source code for the page, I found a JavaScript file being loaded that most likely handled the chat widget. Using Adblock Plus, I added a custom Ad Blocking filter to block ||cdn.gigya.com/JS/socialize.js from loading. This is what the Adblock Plus Filter Preferences dialog should look like after adding the filter:

AdBlockPlus Filter Preferences

Success! No more chat widget on those pages and the video was much smoother afterwards. Note: this will affect any webpage that uses the same script to display a similar chat widget.

I haven’t tried it yet but I suspect adding an entry to the Windows’ HOSTS file for cdn.gigya.com to point to 127.0.0.1 would have the same effect and would prevent all browsers from showing the chat widget (or anything else associated with that sub-domain).

6 thoughts on “How to Remove the Chat Widget While Watching NASCAR RaceBuddy or Media Center

  1. Wild bill

    Do you have a solution to block ads and widgets in the most recent firefox and ad block plus ad on?
    Your last was awsome. ty very much your the best!
    The old solution doesnt work now.

    Reply
  2. Mark Headrick Post author

    With Firefox 16.0.2 and Adblock Plus with the default Easy List filter subscription I just have a custom filter setup for ||cdn.gigya.com/JS/socialize.js as I mention above. I’m viewing Race Buddy right now and I don’t really see any ads and there is no chat widget on the right, just a big black nothingness. I’m doing nothing different than before. So uhm, I don’t know. Make sure you actually have ABP enabled for the page. For reference I’m on Windows 7 Pro 64-bit now.

    Reply
  3. WildBill

    Hey back again. This year Nascar is offering Racebuddy on every race. I was wondering if you still have a fix to block the ads and chat wiget in firefox 35.0.1. I dont know what race buddy will be like this year but it would be great without ads.

    Hope your still there!

    Reply