EZProxy and OvidSP Round 2 – Removing the Tip Box

Last month I wrote about how to use EZProxy’s find and replace feature to change the unhelpful text on a database tab to something more helpful:EZProxy Find and Replace: when the vendor says they can’t…  Well the Medical Librarians at U of C had another request; to see if we could get rid of that Tip Box that appears after a slight delay.

The tip box is annoying because the delay in its appearing seems to
contribute to the jumpiness of the screen – which is the real problem.
There’s a delay somewhere and I’ve seen my students use the system and
boxes they tick, or in entering the search strategy, keystrokes don’t
register as something happens behind the scene and the whole screen jumps
around. Tip box or not, they’ll have to fix that. I’m hearing it as the
#1 complaint on the med librarians’ listservs.

I asked Ovid tech support if it could be removed, and they said sorry, nope, even though that’s requested even more than the tab name change was!

So again, EZProxy to the rescue.  This one’s not quite as elegant, as I was trying to wrap it up on Friday afternoon, but I did some hunting and pecking and learned that there’s a javascript being called (after a delay) that’s responsible for the Tip Box.  Break that script, and voila, no more Tip Box.

So this time in your EZProxy config file you can use:

T Ovid (or whatever we’re calling it)
U http://www.ovid.com (whatever)
DJ ovid.com  (whatever)
Find advertising.js   tips01342.js
Replace advertisin.js   tips0134x.js

Told you it was kinda ugly, but basically we’re renaming the called javascript to one that doesn’t exist, and thus it doesn’t get called.  We tried replacing it with a blank (nothing) but it didn’t work, so as soon as we found something that did, we stuck with it.

Here are the before and after pix:

Before:

After:

And no more screen jumping.