Can't enable Ads while offline, from brave://rewards page

[stephendonner]

Description

Can't enable Ads while offline, from brave://rewards page

Steps to Reproduce

1. new profile
2. launch Brave
3. disconnect from Wi-Fi/internet
4. load brave://settings
5. click on Brave Rewards in the left pane
6. click on the right pane to enable Brave Private Ads
7. click Skip for now
8. click Continue
9. click Done
10. dismiss the panel
11. load brave://rewards
12. try to toggle Ads to On

Actual result:

Expected result:

Should be able to enable Ads, as you can from brave://settings, while offline

Reproduces how often:

100%

Brave version (brave://version info)

Brave	1.33.51 Chromium: 95.0.4638.69 (Official Build) nightly (64-bit)
Revision	6a1600ed572fedecd573b6c2b90a22fe6392a410-refs/branch-heads/4638@{#984}
OS	Linux

[tmancey]

@stephendonner ads by design cannot be enabled unless the user has an internet connection (as ads needs a valid wallet). For me the ads switch is also disabled at brave://settings/rewards

[tmancey]

@emerick your thoughts on the above please? Thanks

[emerick]

@tmancey I wasn't aware of that. So I take it then that the bug is we're allowing ads to be enabled from brave://settings/rewards?

[tmancey]

@emerick see above screenshot, as "Brave private ads" are not enabled for me when following the above steps. So for me, this is working as expected

[stephendonner]

Not enabled/off is not the same as disabled, in my case here (not to split hairs). I'm still able to enable them via brave://settings/rewards but not brave://rewards, while offline:

[tmancey]

@stephendonner ah so yes I missed the last step where you enabled "Brave private ads" from brave://settings/rewards. @emerick a user should not be able to enable ads unless they have an internet connection.

[emerick]

OK, got it.

[tmancey]

If we allow users to enable rewards/ads without an internet connection, they will see a lot of -1 errors in the logs.

[emerick]

Is it me or does this behavior only work on Mac? After disabling WiFi on Windows, Ads is still allowing me to enable/disable itself at will.

[stephendonner]

Is it me or does this behavior only work on Mac? After disabling WiFi on Windows, Ads is still allowing me to enable/disable itself at will.

Just you 😉

[tmancey]

I have seen inconsistencies with Chromium detecting Windows network connections.

[emerick]

I see how this works now. It seems that you can actually enable Ads when you don't have an Internet connection, it's just that you have to have already created a wallet before disabling your network connection. In my test, I successfully enabled Ads with my network disconnected because I already had a wallet. So there's really no explicit code in Ads to do this, it just sort of happens due to the way things are structured. In fact, when you try to enable Ads with the network disconnected and no wallet the screen flickers because it's trying to turn Ads on, but the wallet creation fails and it goes back to disabled again.

It honestly seems to me like we should be more intentional in our handling of this. Having an Ads toggle button that stops working without warning when the Internet isn't connected seems like it will frustrate/confuse users. It also doesn't cover the (probably common) case of a user enabling Rewards/Ads and then losing internet connectivity (unless I'm missing something...)