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End Run Around Pop-up Blockers

Posted by timothy on from the rolls-downhill dept.

An anonymous reader writes "The pop-up arms race continues, cnet has this article on how advertisers are responding to pop-up blockers." Can't wait for a full page of javascripted user-initiated pop-ups.

9 of 484 comments (clear)

  1. FireFox by Wheaty18 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have not had one popup since I fully switched to FireFox (around 6 months ago).

    There is also a FireFox extension that blocks those annoying Flash popunder ads.

    1. Re:FireFox by Squareball · · Score: 5, Informative

      The best extension is the Flash Click To Play in FireFox! No more blaring annoying Flash ads anymore! All you get is a white window with red writing that says "Flash. Click to play" and if you want to view the flash content you click it.

    2. Re:FireFox by CaptBubba · · Score: 5, Informative

      Use adblock instead. just put in wildcard strings such as "ads.*" "*doubleclick*" "*fastclick*" "*burstnet*", and more, and you will block all of the ad shit (including flash) coming from their servers. What good is a javascript mouseover if the script can't download the ad in the first place?

    3. Re:FireFox by SmilingBoy · · Score: 5, Informative
      I use these regexps, in case anyone is interested. I'll have a look at yours as well.

      [Adblock]
      googlesyndication
      us.yimg.com/a/
      /\/b uy_assets\//
      /[\W\d_](top|bottom|left|right|)?ban ner(s|id=|\d|_)[\W\d]/
      /[\W\d](double|fast)click[ \W\d]/
      /[\W\d]click(stream|thrutraffic|thru|xchan ge)[\W\d]/
      /[\W\d]value(stream|xchange|click)[\W\ d]/
      /[\W\d]dime(xchange|click)[\W\d]/
      /[\W\d](on lineads?|ad(banner|click|-?flow|frame|ima?g(es?)?| _id|js|log|serv(er|e)?|stream|_string|s|trix|type| vertisements?|v|vert|xchange)?)[\W\d]/
      /(hot|spy) log/
      /[\W_](b(an|nr)s?|jump|redir(ect|s)?|stat)[\ W_]/
      /\W(cy|r)?c(ou)?nt(er|ed)?\W/
      /p(artner|ing \.cgi|romotion)/
      reklama
      /sp(onsor|ymagic)/
      /to p(100|cto)/

  2. The wonderful program that is Proxomitron. by DrEldarion · · Score: 5, Informative

    If the code is on the page, The Proxomitron can kill it. I haven't seen a pop-up that has been able to get past it yet, and even if one did, I could just make a new filter to kill all pop-ups of that sort.

    It also blocks other ads, background midis, flash animations, and all sorts of other annoyances in addition to adding functionality to other sites if you're clever enough to write some nice regular expressions and HTML code.

    Wonderful little program.

  3. Examples of some sneakier popup methods by IvyMike · · Score: 5, Informative

    Click here to see some sneakier popup methods. Some even get around firefox popup blocking, although I'm certain that once they become popular, the army of mozilla hackers will find a way to block them.

  4. Re:Can't they see it won't work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    ... and add it to their hosts file pointing at 127.0.0.1 ...

    I don't get this.

    Why does everyone advocate pointing these to 127.0.0.1?

    127.0.0.1 is your local machine. It's not some magic blackhole address. Using 127.0.0.1 really messes you up if you happen to be running a web server on your machine (doing web development, say). It's bad advice.

    It's so much easier to point them to 0.0.0.0. That works just as well in the hosts file, and since it's an invalid IP address, attempting to open a socket returns immediately with failure. No need to bounce the requests off your local machine, and your web browser instantly blocks images, pages, etc. from those domains.

  5. Fear the worst by mpcooke3 · · Score: 5, Informative

    I develop a contextual/live feed advertising system (yes flame me if you wish) and we have one guy who attends IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) events here in the UK, so I get to hear about all the "latest and greatest" advertising formats.

    In response to the adblocking technology several new ad formats are being approved for general usage and they all suck.Basically the new ad formats are much much bigger than the current sizes. I can't remember what sizes they were but I was crying when I was told. (bad luck 800x600 users)

    Other "great" news from the cutting edge of advertising is that more full movie streaming ads will become popular (obviously with advertisers not with users)

    And worst of all what are currently blockable popup ads will be replaced with Flash overlays that fly around screen.

    Apparently the IAB did an expensive study in the states into what normal users thought of all these new ad formats (pop-ups, pop-unders, flash overlays, dhtml etc,) And the result was that most users call all annoying ads "pop-ups" and they really hate them. Well duh, I'm not sure what the point of *that* study was for.

    On the plus side I remember hearing that IAB guidlines will recommend all flash overlays have a close button.

    So in general the whole state of affairs depresses me ALOT. I don't think the IAB/advertisers have even got Avalon on their radar yet, but I imagine Avalon ads will enable a whole new generation of annoying ads.

    For normal users this will all suck, but most of the ads probably won't work on a standard debian install so /.ers don't have too much to worry about.

  6. No annoying popups with tabs by solicit · · Score: 5, Informative

    Popups are irritating because they, well, pop up, when you least expect it, where you least expect it, and have to spend time and nerves closing it. But when you use tabbed browsing and set new windows to open up as new tabs, this problem is gone. It is when I use a browser without tabs for some time and notice those ugly popups that I think - why don't I ever notice any popups? And this is because when an ad appears in some tab, I just click where the X that closes the tab usually is and get it over with.