Since CR4, Connections has a new community overview, avaliable on https://cnxhost.com/communities/service/html/allmycommunities. This page uses the new IBM Plex font from a third-party cdn called unpkg.com. I already opened a support ticket at IBM, but they said it's an enhancement, which should be posted here.
I disagree for several reasons:
- Using IBM Connections On Prem, I expect to load ressources from my own server. Connections already do this fine with other css/js. Only on the new Community overview, it has an external third party cdn.
- unpkg.com is sometimes slow, which result in slow page loading time.
- Some of our users doesn't even have internet access. It's not practicable to require them to have internet only for this reason, when they don't need it for their daily work
- Forcing ressources being loaded on third party cdns causes security and privacy risks that could be easily avoided
- Especially unpkg.com is questionable for privacy since it's hosted in the Google cloud (Google is known for collecting any data they could get and use them commercially)
Please fix this by switching to local files as IBM Connections already do with any other ressources (images, css and js) before. It's okay to have external CDNs as optional functionality, which could be enabled. But connections on prem shouldn't force it's customers to use external third party CDNs here.
My current workaround is to download the font on our webserver and search/replace the unpkg.com urls in the Connections CSS file. But this is a hack that may cause problems on updates, so we need official support for self hosted font files without doing unsupported core changes.
