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Adblock Plus Maker Proposes Change To Help Sites
Dotnaught writes "Wladimir Palant, maker of the Firefox extension Adblock Plus, on Monday proposed a change in his software that would allow publishers, with the consent of Adblock Plus users, to prevent their ads from being blocked. Palant suggested altering his software to recognize a specific meta tag as a signal to bring up an in-line dialog box noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking. The user would then have to choose to respect that wish or not."
Correct me if I'm wrong, but did the article imply that the AdBlock guys are asking advertisers to change their code just so AdBlock can allow or disallow ads like NoScript already does? It would be kinda pointless since many AdBlock users also have NoScript installed!
Despite the FUD surrounding NoScript, I'll take it over AdBlock any day (well, at least until they refuse to block ads other than those on their own page).
NoScript's AdBlock-blocking trick was kinda dirty, but I don't see them as being hypocritical for allowing their own ads given the tremendous service(which increases safety while speeding up browsing) they provide for free.
Oh hey, look! there's a new adblocking extension available for firefox that doesn't do the exact OPPOSITE of ad blocking!
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
I expect to see this meta tags on most sites in the near future.
Know what my user consent is? Not listing your advert in my filter list. Otherwise, it seems like it's already been denied consent.
Can't it be assumed by virtue of the ads being placed on the site to begin with that the owner wishes they be shown?
Digital Sailor
If I wanted to see ads... I wouldn't block them. This feature seems redundant.
Next, we are going to see a new feature to our javascript blocker that asks us if we are sure we want to block access to javascript for a given site, "cause they really, really want it!"
No.
The genie is already out of the bottle; there is no going back.
Wanna pay me some protection money? Just a buck a week will keep you safe. If you don't pay it, I'll break your legs.
This is just like the time the phone company got you to pay to have your number unlisted. Then they turned around and sold their unlisted numbers to people. Then they came to you to sell you caller ID, so you could screen your calls. Then they started charging telemarketers money to have their caller ID's blocked from displaying.
Fuck them.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I'm fine with that, as long as there's a setting to control whether or not to honor the flag. I want the option of saying "No, if I want ads to not be blocked I'll add an exception for that site myself so don't bother bringing up the dialog.". I note that there's already an option to disable ad blocking for the page or the whole site in the right-click menu of ABP's icon, so an easy way to add an exception's already in place.
Maybe there should be an extension that blocks extensions from being automatically updated just because it's listed with others to be updated. That should solve the updated with new "features" problem.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
And just install "NagBlock Plus".
Um, don't most ad-based companies only pay the site whenever a user clicks on an ad? Most of the time, unless its some really amazing ad (like buy a Core i7 Desktop for $330 from Newegg), most technical users know never to click on the ads. So its really a moot point if they aren't viewing them or not clicking on them.
Plus doesn't this effectively break some ad companies EULAs? Because I know a lot of them forbid you from enticing users to click the ads by saying "Please click the ads" or something.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Anyone with half a brain just blocks ads from the hosts file anyway.
I've never once used any resource wasting browser extensions for this.
Time for a fork. If he's serious about this, Wladimir Palant should /not/ be allowed to control this project. The whole /point/ of Adblock Plus, is to, y'know, BLOCK ADS.
Seriously. He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted. Who's to say they won't convince him to sneak in some code that 'accidentally' fails to block a certain set of ads?
Take it out of Wladimir Palant's control, and we'll all be better off.
...they had no Flash, no animated GIF, or any other obnoxious animations to attract attention to themselves. I wouldn't block ads as a matter of course if I could be sure they all stuck to my "nothing moving" requirement. And it only takes one offender to ruin things. If Palant carries through with his unblock idea, I hope he imposes similar requirements on sites and ads wishing to be unblocked. Otherwise, I hope someone forks Adblock Plus and does away with the unblock free pass.
In other (related) news, Slashdot today allowed me to disable all the ads on the site, simply for occasionally moderating an not posting stupid crap all the time. I was using adblock anyway but this removes the blank space and allows the content to expand into the areas the ads used to occupy.
Thank you Slashdot.
This is totally stupid. If I have adblock on, I don't want to be bothered with ads and pop-ups. If I want to see ads on a certain site, I'll white list that site. Don't annoy me with popups asking me if I want to see ads. I obviously don't or I would have enabled them!
I don't mind Text Only ads in out of the way places on a page. Gmails right-side ads don't bother me at all, and often include actually helpful links.
What I do mind, is Graphic Ads that disrupt the layout of the page, or the flow as I am scrolling to read. Completely unacceptable.
I would be willing to allow select pages to display text ads that are carefully placed to minimize interference if I only want the content while at the same time providing helpful suggestions when I might want them. Is that too much to ask? I think it might be...
What?
And the cycle begins, Stop the Ad Blocker with the Ad Blocker Blocker, Ad Blocker fights back with the Ad Blocker Blocker Blocker.
I am a content provider myself and run roughly 100 different sites. And I can tell you from my experience that sites that use pop ups these days are not ligament websites you would want too allow popups from.
Sure there are plenty of websites that use popups correctly and are useful but the majority of these are popups that the user initialize by clicking on a link, not random popups that are not user controled meaning ads.
There are plenty of technologies that people can utalize to make useful and helpful "popup" windows like litebox/thickbox that still allow publishers and content providers the ability to show content in a new window while not losing focus on the main page.
Popup blockers are a good thing, and adding an incontinence popup warning defaeats the purpose of blocking popup windows. If a user didn't click on something to initialize a popup window then they shouldn't be seeing popups.
TruePunk | Games
Bah, if I blocked ads then I'd never find half of them...
If they implement it like flash block so that the ad is replaced with a button to click to show the ad then I might consider turning the option on. If it pops up a dialog every time it blocks an ad then it goes in the bin!
Oh yeah, it will only show this pop up requesting the ad be displayed when there is a special meta-tag. I wonder how many seconds it will take for every ad service to include that tag.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
I don't use ad blockers because I realize that the free web exists as it is because of ads.
I do have a flash blocker because flash things (ads and otherwise) were getting way, way too obnoxious. But if someone cares to have a nice tasteful ad I don't
mind looking at it.
So I think the concept of allowing respectful advertisement to proceed is a good one, so long as you can permanently dismiss an add forever and not have it ask you again. It would encourage ads I and others wouldn't mind seeing, and that's a good thing for everyone.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
are TOO successful. You're a webmaster running a site that's partially (or completely) paid for by advertising. You see in your analytics report of hits that a significant percentage of viewers are running AdBlock. So not only are you NOT getting clicks, but your advertisers aren't even being seen to begin with. And let's assume you're honest (and that your advertisers are too), and that your ads aren't malicious and in fact serve a normal purpose: to advertise a legitimate product. Given this, I can see why AdBlock might be considering this option. If they've gotten enough complaints from legitimate companies/websites with legitimate ads saying essentially "hey, your product is costing me a substantial amount of revenue loss", then its understandable that AdBlock would consider this. Since AdBlock's an open source/freeware product(hi Stallman!/Stallman's acolytes! Please do ignore my semi-ignorant malapropism... there's plenty of room for you in my colon!), basically AdBlock (and NoScript) are allowing users to get something for nothing... for free! We are cheating the system in a way. So I say let AdBlock look at doing it. I'll admit, sometimes it's good to see advertising, especially if it's a product/service I'm interested in. I run AB/NS simply because I've been burned one too many time by a scriptkiddie, but I do allow websites I trust to show ads.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
You could add the ability of the site administrator to add a graphic to the request, just to help get the user's attention. And also add some animation capability, just for fun! Yes, I can see how this will help users block ads! Brilliant. Clearly AdBlock is really helping their customers out here.
Currently hooked on AMP
A pop up asking me whether I want to view ads or not would be worse than having inline ads themselves. The only way this would be acceptable is if it has a "master" checkbox letting me turn off the whole feature. And have it checked by default.
If this features makes it in, I see a new fork of Adblock coming out pretty quickly.
At first, I cringed when I read the lead-in.
But then I realized that there WAS, indeed, a few times when I have wanted to let ads through, in every instance a website that I wanted to support by viewing their ads (their only source of revenue).
But the annoyance aspect overshadows that desire.
Compromise. Just put an added pull-down option (up next to the ABP icon) that simply says "View Ads on this page", and a "Remember this choice" checkbox.
Adds the same functionality WITHOUT taking the choice out of the hands of the USER. Dialog boxes SUCK.
I don't know what the big deal is with these adblock/noscript systems. Sites that offer a service for free, it seems to me, should be allowed to show ads, and if I'm using those services, I should allow them to display on my screen. Occasionally--very rarely--I'm intrigued enough to click.
/. provides a pretty worthwhile service--even if it's only entertainment--and while I don't really feel the urge to be a paying subscriber, I don't feel such great vitriol towards the ads that I need to block them.
If I don't want ads, I should be given an option to pay for the service and get an ad-free version.
If I go to a site and it's just plastered in ads, I typically just don't go back there.
I'm certainly not holier than anyone, but I figure a site like
For people who use these plug-ins, do you ever whitelist ads for sites you use a lot for free, or do you block everything? If the latter, can you give me the dime tour of your justification for doing so? I'm not trying to start a flame-war; I'm really trying to understand the motivation.
The CB App. What's your 20?
How about something specific and selective... I don't mind seeing banner ads, but I want something that eliminates rollover ads completely. And don't give them the option of asking to be disabled.
Ideally they could ask to be excluded but the software would deliver electric shocks to the advertiser's groin instead.
When are these clowns going to learn that if they make really annoying ads that make the page load slower, nobody is going to want to look at them?
Put another way, why don't they try making the ads be part of the HTML as normal images and text, instead of annoying bloated crap ads served by a 3rd party? It seems like "ad banners" are a 1990's idea that somehow has too much momentum behind it to ditch it. Also, I think many of the big content providers (think newspapers) are really missing the boat by outsourcing their ad service.
Why not treat internet ads a lot like newspaper ads? One page, one ad, for everyone who sees it. Wouldn't that be pretty attractive for an advertiser, and maybe command a better fee? (think repetition and distribution factor).
A better option would be to allow users to download the ads but don't show them. The site gets the advertising revenue and the users don't get bombarded by unwanted ads.
As I recall, the whole blowup started because the AdBlock guy specifically requested that the blacklist sites list NoScript's ad-servers in what seems to me like an ad hominem attack.
AdBlock Plus kind of sucks. The original AdBlock was a much more useful plugin, especially with the overlay-Flash option. It seems that development has gone off on weird tangents that don't really benefit users anymore.
Now the developer wants to implement an override based upon what advertisers want instead of what the user wants. Okay, so then the user *might* be able to go in and override the override... 'Seems like a lot of BS to go through with zero benefit to me.
I think it's time to find a new ad-blocker.
Why not sending first a Pop-Up on the publisher's computer to ask whether he is certain he wants to advertise?!?
...provided the box could be shut off permanently. If it pops up for every site and I can't turn it off, I'll just find another ad blocker.
That said, there are some sites where I leave ad blocking on -- generally, they're sites that I want to support, and that don't serve up ads that jiggle or flash obnoxious colors. If I see an ad like that, I just turn ads right back off for that site and forget about it.
I've noticed a lot of sites lately (I stumble) that feed non-advertising images from the same urls as adverts. The result is that adblock+ blocks them.. and without those images the article is worthless. I expect this will continue and any article where the point is "hey, look at this" will require a temporary disabling of adblock+ and the display of ads.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I wouldn't mind spending some of my bandwidth to download the ads as long as they weren't displayed. This would help some websites that get revenue based on number of impressions.
that will show the ad if it is clicked. no need for popups or anything else. the annoyance of adds is rarely that they are taking up valuable screen space, but rather they are some gif thats annoying as fuck. a simple button is not. resize-able would be better even, as well as permanent black/white lists (maybe they already have those? i dunno i've never bothered looking into it cause it works fine as-is. /2 cents.
Long ago I did not mind ads. Sure, I did not click any significant number of them, but I did neither mind those banners and whatnot being displayed. This changed as they became more and more intrusive and obnoxious. Blinking in bright colors; pop-up; pop-under; pop-in-front-of-the-actual-webpage; punch-the-monkey; you-are-the-100000000st-visitor; *brrrring**brrriiing*-now-with-sound. So I decided to to what I had to do; these "guests" had outstayed their welcome, and now I showed them the door.
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
The latest dirty trick that's ticking me off are mouse-over popups. They buy a wide banner placement, and if you make the mistake of scrolling over them, up pops a huge screen-grabbing popup. Fortunately adblock plus takes care of the danged banners in the first place, so I haven't been getting those since I installed it.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
translate palant (PL) to english, you get the puenta
It's starting to sound like the "Caller ID", "Caller ID Blocking", "Caller ID Blocking Unblocking" scams the phone companies charge you for.
Although I will say that I tend to only block the junk that gets in my way. That includes frames in the middle of the articles, anything that 'floats over' the page, anything that flashes, anything that appears when the mouse goes over a word that isn't part of the menu, etc.
Hmmm... Come to to think of it, that covers almost everything. And for that matter, that annoying garbage is the exact reason I installed Adblocker in the the first place...
I know some of you would say that any ads are annoying, but I would be willing to load and view reasonably sized banner/side ads that were:
- not animated
- didn't popup or popunder in any way
- didn't play sounds
I'd subscribe to an adblock plus list set which didn't block sites which would play by those rules. Every time I decide to play nice and view ads to show support I get hit (within 24 hours) with one that's so annoying I give it up.
Of course I also think this will never happen, so it's a bit of an empty promise - as soon as I got hit with an ad that violated those rules I'd instantly go back to the nuke it from orbit list.
How long until we get the Trace Busta Busta Busta?
I've lost count of the amount of times I've been on a site and thought "Hey, this is a small, independent little site that I want to support, I'll just whitelist it for future visits", only to find that they've got that godawful "intellitext" stuff. I wouldn't mind it so much, but literally as soon as you rollover some of the highlighted text, your entire screen is taken over by an incredibly obtrusive ad. And the site quickly gets removed from the whitelist.
If a site is careful about the ads it uses and is respectful to those who visit, I'm willing to whitelist it and face the ads, but if it takes the piss (popups, noisy flash ads and, most of all - intellitext), I don't give it a chance.
I'm probably in the minority, though.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
As a business, money (mostly) makes the world go around.
It's well known that ads are simply a business model that people (including myself) don't enjoy. Many of us choose the alternative: eliminate the annoyance, and the internet is more enjoyable.
Things I don't miss: Ads that you simply don't care to see (Viagra for women? Not for me, thank you) Ads that get in the way of actually READING something (flashing ads, Flash "window" ads, etc) And my personal favorite: Misleading ads.
Please (PLEASE!) don't make a new annoyance just because they're not getting their way. I'm -okay- with reasonable sanity (remember those old Google text-only ads?), but I have AdBlock installed for a reason.
If AdBlock goes to a business model that makes browsing annoying again, I'll find a new alternative. Either way, I'll be getting what I want, and what AdBlock does is its own business.
I will point something out though: most of our support would dry up once annoyances come up again. An unhappy consumer base won't go very far in the long run.
There are no perfect answers, only the right questions. More questions at http://foresightandhindsight.blogspot.com/
Who doesn't see this as a grab for the cash?
"Pay us and we will nag the user for you till they surrender."
Thanks, but no thanks.
Howbout someone come up with a way I can get a quarter of a penny for each ad that gets foisted onto my screen. I'd unblock everyone for that.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The trouble with this plan is that; whether to see or not see adds is MY choice. Not an advertisers choice nor the choice of AdBlock's author. And not the developer of some website who allows ads to be placed. Yes, I understand ad space is sold to pay for the website, but the truth remains, the choice is mine if I want to see them. Maybe if ads weren't animated, weren't made with Flash, and just sat there like a magazine ad I wouldn't block many, in fact I might click on a few that looked interesting.
What if there was a way that sites could commit to "text-only" ads, like Google? I would consider setting a flag that allowed text-only advertising on sites that committed to not be obnoxious.
Insteaed of annoying ads, we get even more annoying pop-ups asking if we want to see the annoying ads that we installed the plugin specifically to block?
There's only two possibilities here: either the pop-up shows the ad, thus making it "not an ad blocker," and therefore, totally, utterly useless, or it doesn't, in which case there's no way to tell if it's an ad I'm willing to tolerate (since my criteria has to do with whether or not it a) makes noise, b) is animated/flashy shit, or c) tries to install malware, and not, in any way, to do with the content of the ad and certainly not the web site that wants to serve it to me).
No thanks. I don't use any ad blocker plugins. I use a hosts file that blocks 99.9% of the crap far more effectively, and is under my control, not that of some software developer who might or might not sell out to the spammers someday.
Am I the only one for whom this feature will presumably never activate due to not preserving my browsing history ever?
They're talking about the wrong type of choice. I'm not interested in choosing whether to allow all ads on foo.com or block all ads on foo.com. First off, it would be a pain, because every time I hit some new web site, I'd have to make this choice. In many cases, this would be my first and last visit to the site: it's just a google hit, and it turns out it's not relevant to me. Why do I want to add extra effort to this quick, pointless visit to foo.com? And even if it was a site I thought I might be coming back to, how would I make an informed decision? I'm not yet familiar enough with the site to know whether their ads are annoying or not. I don't know if their ads are animated or static; I don't know if they load flash; I don't know if they lock up my cpu with heavy javascript.
What I want is a way to control the type of ad that's shown. I don't mind text-based ads. I just don't want ads with graphics, flash, or javascript (beyond the basic javascript that's required in order to load a text-based adsense ad).
The sites that think this is a good idea also need to do a reality check. The reason I use adblock plus is that I don't click on internet ads. I never have, and I never will. If, as TFA says, 5% of internet users use adblock plus, and if most of us never would click on an ad even if we selectively turned off filtering, then what is the point of showing us ads? The number of impressions would go up by 5%, but the number of click-throughs would go down by 5%. Advertisers would see that click-through rates were down 5%, so they would be willing to pay 5% less for ads. So sites that ran ads would get exactly the same revenue, and all they'd gain would be the happy knowledge that they were annoying 5% of their users and making them more likely to stop visiting.
Find free books.
I'd like a function in my ad blocking extension where all ads are initially displayed. If a website behaves badly with their advertising, a single click permanently disables all the ads on that site based on the currently existing subscription lists.
Adblock basically has all the code for this function already, but it isn't implemented within a friendly user interface.
very simple answer: it is not ad block, if it does not block ads.
I already mailed him of my first boycott. This proposal, if it goes through, will be the second mailing. I'm definitely not planning to go back to adblock with these two ideas.
The reason he's doing it is greed. This is a surefire sign that the addon is going downhill.
Maybe if the guy didn't have the addonload his homepage every time you download an update, he wouldn't have crazy bandwidth costs, duh.
"We apologise again for the fault in the Adblock plus software. Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked for slowing the Interwebs down with their ads have been sacked."
I've been using Adblock for years, and I love it.
Here's the thing though: I don't hate ads. I really don't. I don't even mind ads that much. I have even been known to click some in the past, especially if they are 'relevant to my interests', as it were.
What I do hate is animating ads. (*) I hate them with a white-hot fury that is almost indescribable, and that is the reason I run Adblock, but that actually blocks everything, so can't really keep the non-obtrusive ads while blocking the annoying ones. For the love of all things holy, and good, why won't online publishers learn this basic rule:
JUST BECAUSE YOU CAN, DOESN'T MEAN YOU SHOULD
So what I propose is this: A "non-animating" ad whitelist system, whereby ads can be tagged as "static", and allowed through Adblock, if the user so chooses. That way, my favorite websites can continue to receive the financial support they need, and my eyes won't bleed trying to read the 3 lines of tiny text hidden somewhere inside a kaleidoscope of shifting and flashing colors.
(*) large, multicolored, animating ads are actually a interesting case study of the tragedy of the commons. Everyone feels that they have to have the flashiest, most colorful ad around to compete with the other flashy colorful ads. This is only individually true. After a while, customers start ignoring all the ads, and actually become annoyed by them. It takes government intervention to stop the insanity, nobody will ever back down on their own. Just take a look at Tokyo at night. Some cities or municipalities DO enforce rules, and you end up with tasteful shopfronts that advertise their wares using mannequins and small, elegant signs with the company logo. The internet needs the same, desperately.
In my opinion, AdBlock does more than merely blocking ads. It can also block malware. Offering to sell a key to this security device to enable "unwanted people" to get into my computer for any reason is... for lack of a better word ***EVIL***. It is immoral. But the word immoral is simply not strong enough to adequately describe it.
Personally I don't mind ads on sites if they are non-intrusive
As long as advertisements provide free porn samples I don't mind looking at ads. I hope there is a tag that can be used to white list porn ads. Even if they are selling something like Charmin toilet paper, or even paint remover, I will watch the ad as long as there are naked woman in it.
Same old pattern really. First gather users and their support, then start fucking with them.
Why can't people learn. I guess it's time to start making the alternative to AdBlock Plus.
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
For those that block ads in a wholesale fashion, I have an honest question -
If everyone blocked all ads, what would you see that as gaining for the internet as a whole?
A lot of quality websites require a lot of resources to create and distribute the content. Most of them are supported by advertising. If they could no longer make sufficient money via advertising (and many are heading to this point), how would they support themselves?
- Converting to a paid service.
This would be bad because it would cost you money, and very few sites would be able to pull it off. Micropayments are one way this could maybe work, but they are still a pipe dream.
- Begging for donations.
Again, very few sites could pull this off.
- Selling personal and/or aggregate user data.
Not a lot of sites that are useful collect much data, and this is arguably worse than advertising.
I'm not trying to make a moral argument out of this, but more of a pragmatic one. You obviously visit ad-supported sites that are useful to you, and it is probably in your interests for them to make enough money to continue providing useful functionality or content, so how do you propose they do so if not through advertising?
Why haven't ad providers tried to go to war with adblock? The rules in the main ABP filterset are generally pretty simple, like ad1.* ad2.* etc.
Why not acquire random domains and dynamically create links to the ads on these servers? I could see ABP blocking the first japi1fas6df.com/273849.gif, but not the 1000th. Is there a technical reason why this would be infeasible?
I don't block the ads on Google, and I've even clicked on a few.
There's a clue in there somewhere.
So now we'll need a plugin for the Adblock Plus plugin that answers the confirmation dialog box that comes up... Between this and the Vista UAC, let's seem how many questions we need to answer before we get to actually do anything useful on our computers anymore...
It could be worse. They could make it a subscription service for webmasters to participate in this or something like this.
That would definitely cross some moral, if not legal line.
Dual Opteron < $600
This option already exists. For the websites, the answer is "always on". We can safely assume that every site wants us all to turn off AdBlock, so the pop-up box does not add any information. For the users, it's the "whitelist" feature in AdBlock. I can turn on ads for any site I want to whitelist. My browser, my choice. That's the way the Internet works. Don't like it? Stop putting stuff on the Internet. If AdBlock won't do it, I'll code it myself or put entries in my hosts file. AdBlock is just easier.
The reason I have ads turned off is because some of them interrupt my browsing experience -- with sound, or popups, or other annoyances. Interstitials I have no problem with, but don't pop a big turd in the middle of what I'm reading, while I'm reading, or have some noise rattle my speakers. You be rude, I turn you off. Start being nice, I'll turn you back on. And Flash? Flash is never getting turned back on by default in any browser I use. Permanent ban for egregious bad behavior. But I digress.
The interrupt is the problem. "Fixing" AdBlock by making AdBlock engage in the same bad behavior I choose to avoid is not a workable solution. I would just switch to or code an alternative.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
If Ad Block Plus gets too annoying, just add the web sites serving ads to your Hosts file, and assign them to 127.0.0.0. Bottom line: if people want to block ads, they'll find a way to do so, and the only thing you will succeed in doing by fighting them is turn them against you. Never underestimate the consequences of shooting yourself in the foot on the Internet.
When the singing, dancing, popover, popunder, cover-the-article, get-in-my-way annoying ads are replaced with low-key, conservative, print-style ads, then I'll stop blocking them. Not before!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
Isn't it implicitly assumed that I _don't_ want ads to show up, just by the very fact I've got Adblock Plus installed and on?
in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I use AdBlock Plus.
I don't subscribe to any filters list as I create my own one-by-one.
I don't block ads served up by the local site.
I do block 3rd-party ads.
My statistics show that I can block more than 50% of all ads with just 3 filters:
*doubleclick*
*adserver*
pagead*.googlesyndication.com/pagead/*
Dave Barnes 9 breweries within walking distance of my house
How many adwriters fought and died for that flag?
Not enough. Not nearly enough.
You can't take the sky from me...
If it did anything remotely annoying someone would immediately fork the code to make it quit doing that. Adblock as a product would then cease to exist and the forked code would take over. Ain't the internet and open source great?
FF Plugins are for kids I Packet Filter Ad Servers before they hit my network. I've been doing this at least since 98 or 99 Get on my level.
Okay, here's common sense 101:
Publishers want their ads to be seen, so they can generate revenue. They hate AdBlock because it cuts into their revenue.
AdBlock users hate ads. They don't want to see any ads.
They are polar opposites, you simply cannot reconcile these two parties. Establishing a "don't block me" list in AdBlock will only result in mass abandonment by AdBlock users, who will flock to a forked or alternative plugin that does what it says on the tin, without any backhanded deals.
Do you think the ad publishers would ever consider asking US, the users, if we'd mind seeing their ads ? No, they shove them up there and make us punch the monkey or watch their obnoxious videos, you know, to politely remind me that Tiger Woods would very much like it if I bought razor blades in-between blog posts, you know, because Tiger cares.
It's quite simple: if AdBlock sells out, someone else will write an unbroken plugin to replace it, and if that fails, well I guess we'll have to make do with proxomitron. Either way, AdBlock loses.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I've seen a lot of comments talking about how they don't mind text ads or static images, and how it's really only the animated GIFs/Flash ads they hate with a passion. I feel very similarly, and that's partly why I never bothered with the AdBlock plugin. An older version of Flash used to crash my browser from time to time, so I installed FlashBlock. Turns out, blocking flash apps by default had a neat side effect of disabling most of the truly annoying ads out there, as well as speeding up my browsing experience. All that's left are text ads and static (or mildly animated) banners, which don't drive me nearly as crazy. If I'm on a site with an embedded video or something I want to actually see, it costs me one more click to load the app, and I get to cherry pick just that app. It's a surprisingly elegant solution.
I always wondered what the "plus" was for, and now I know:)
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The only reason advertisers advertise is because if they don't other products will increase brand recognition while they will lose brand recognition. If you block ads completely you are not hurting advertisers, everyone is blocked therefore everyone is on the same playing field. But if you selectively enable ads you are, some adverstisers are blocked some aren't. Therefore you only have 1 of 2 choices, all blocked or all unblocked.
I really wouldn't mind if this would lead to a minimal accepted standard of what a "good" ad is: No animation or even flash, no sound or music, limited size (both in pixels and bytes), limited amount of ads per page, clear indication that it actually is an ad. *Then* add an option to ABP to allow these "good ads".
When I'm now and then browsing the web without an ad-blocker I'm totally shocked what's going on out there. Some pages are not only taking ages to load, they're actually unreadable and the content is so well hidden among all this flashing, moving, changing and talking stuff that I can't imagine this is in the best interest of all. Getting some sane standards here would be a real godsend. I certainly don't mind an ad here and there if I can rely on them behaving themselves.
But just having a flag that causes ABP not to block the ad is like a spam blocker respecting an email header not to block that spam. Totally insane, if you ask me.
First!
Boy, I hope they don't extend this idea to the FireFox plugin I use, StupidCommentBlocker Plus. That's the plugin that blocks out all the idiotic comments on various websites. I use it all the time for Slashdot.
Otherwise, this entire site would be so annoying to read.
A button in Adblock would be cool to show seldom in one corner of the website to say "Support this site".
Then it would download the ads but not show them (or optionally show them [or optionally click them]). Your favorite sites would get more income. My browser knows what sites I've been to often, no extra tag necessary.
As far as I know, most people don't use ad-blocking, so the ad companies won't get weird ideas to circumvent that.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
Adverts don't have to be flashing, bouncing, animated AVIs with extra-embedded javascript.
There's a few sites I visit which have adverts done with this thing called 'text'. I can see them, which must mean that adblock isn't blocking them.
PS: Adblock is a tiny percentage of Internet users and they're all rabid anti-advert types so any revenue being 'lost' is just background noise.
No sig today...
Why not just have a "Flashblock" style placeholder which a user can "show", "always show" or "never show" or just ignore?
Boffoonery - downloadable Comedy Benefit for Bletchley Park
Ugh. No. Maybe it's just me, but my browsing experience slows way down waiting for all the various ad server domains to resolve. For the record, there are a handful of sites that I have turned off Adblock for because I appreciate what they are doing and because they don't do it in an annoying way.
That's even worse! It would mean bandwidth wasted on ads that are guaranteed not to have any effect. That's just a waste of money both for you and for the site owner. No good ad system works based on the number of times an ad is viewed. They work based on which ads get clicked on or generate sales.
I agree. The only way to make this whole system fail is to refuse to enable it. The great trick of the advertisers is making you think they have some entitlement to stick themselves into your life.
You want things to change? The system must fail in order for it to change.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
there is an "always no" option (ie. don't ask me this again, I don't want to see any fucking ads.. ever), I'm OK with it. I'd be using that option, BTW :->
I am the maverick of Slashdot
So I should rather use WontAdBlock? Thanks a lot.
...
sudo apt-get lynx espeak
Actually, until ads quit infecting my computer, I'm going to be blocking everything I possibly can. My virus/malware infection per month ratio dropped dramatically with the addition of Adblock Plus.
Perhaps the advertisers should be going after the reason most people are blocking ads these days.
No! It's a *SIG*. Keep the Special Interest Groups away! (Con joke!)
As stated, this is really just AdBlock trying to make you feel guilty about blocking the ads on your favorite sites; there's no advantage for the user because it's easy to select "Disable on www.example.com" for any page you want to support.
Adblock gives us power over advertisers, and we should be using that power to make advertising better, by demanding concessions from the ad companies. Put together a list of companies (or adservers) which agree to a certain code of conduct-- no Flash, no animation, no NSFW, etc, and then give Adblock users the capability to show ads IF they are on sites the user wants to support AND if the ads come from a company on the list. It wouldn't even have to be the whole company; adservers could provide special "sanitized" feeds which would be put on the list. If they break the pledge, Adblock users complain and they get taken off the list.
----
Another, completely different idea: one thing I dislike about ads is how they clutter up a page. What if you could tell Adblock to shunt a page's advertising over to a specially designated ad window. Each ad could be labelled with the name of the site it came from, and you could peruse it at your leisure (or not-- the website will still get credit for eyeballs). Of course, you could specify which sites should have their ads shunted, and which should have their ads blocked. (And yeah, I know that this sounds a little like bringing back the pop-up ad, but in this case all the images end up in one window, which you can keep minimized if you like.)
Is this sort of behavior possible for a Firefox extension?
I clear mine every time I close Firefox.
Doesn't everyone?
and then the "blacklist" format would change so that only the code with the undesired/unasked for so called "feature" would work correctly. Ain't [insert stuff here] great?
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Mods, he may not be offtopic.
SigBlocking is not the cure for $600 promos.
Depends on how good his comment is,
Everyone mods it up.
Later, it goes to +5...
Like that's the seal of approval.
It's related to the Captcha problem.
No software can strip the ads out of this post.
Text is Static - there is no LetterItemVeto.
Embedding may be the bane of the future.
Like the caps, my friend?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
They may have the right to show ads, as you say. But they have absolutely no right to demand that I view them.
If you're not willing to support sites you like by viewing ads, why do you visit the sites? No one is *demanding* that you visit their site. If a majority of people started using noscript and adblockers web sites would drop like flies and your internet searches would come up much emptier if not empty. My bet is even /. will go offline if advertising revenue dries up.
It's pretty safe to assume that if a site has ads, they want you to see the ads. Every ad provider that knows about the tag will require its use on every site that uses their ads. They might as well just make it a one-time option to enable ads on sites you visit frequently.
Also, if people really care about encouraging "acceptable" ads, they should create a new subscription list that only bans the obnoxious ones. Then maybe you could use the strict list on one-off visits and the "acceptable" list for sites you visit regularly.
I just saw this on the slashdot front page:
____
Disable Advertising
As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising.
____
Erm.... Adblock Plus and noscript took care of them for years. Why start offering good posters "candy" we've had for years? I have no qualms about blocking every ad and interstitial out there. Its your choice to put them there. Its my choice to "not consume".
And go ahead, detect Im using ABP and NS. I'll start using a blocking proxy. Simply solved. What's it again? apt-get install squid?
I use NoScript because my social contract with web site owners to view their ads doesn't cover pop-ups or intrusive flash, but web site owners have got to eat like everyone else and their revenue model depends on delivering advertising. If they do it in a nasty way which interferes with my ability to browse, then no-script kills them, but if it's not I'm happy to view it. I won't click on it because I think that active advertising is a stupid idea, but I'll view it.
Right, there's no way AdBlock Plus could have a setting to permanently disable the dialog (and automatically leave ads out).
-- listen to interesting music, support independent radio... WPRB
Personally, I start with an empty list. If an ad annoys or offends me, then I add the ad-server's entire domain to my list of blocked sites. My list of blocks is around 30 long accumulated over ~2 years. It doesn't take much to eliminate the really bad ones out there.
It's perfect tit-for-tat. Evil ads get punished. Good ads get rewarded. (Then again maybe I only surf sites that use good ads, it's hard to tell.)
AdBlocker Plus exists for the purpose of helping people navigate the web without being inundated with obtrusive flash-based pointless graphics bandwidth-hogging advertisements that don't pertain to my interests. I understand that companies need to make money, but somehow Google and its text-based ads manage to be unobtrusive and are more likely to pertain to my interests. I've clicked on more Google text-based ads than flash-based ads. To me, all these flash-based ads on CNN and other websites are like going to New York City and trying to find the addresses of businesses you're trying to seek, which is one reason why having a Garmin GPS unit is very helpful for those in unfamiliar places.
My message to the advertising world: Change your ways and get away from the 'ALL IN YOUR FACE' advertising on the web, because if you don't, you'll go the way of the dinosaur. Understand that at this time more than any other, people's time is worth more than in the past. If you're going to advertise, do so unobtrusively and intelligently, like Google, or even besting Google. Trying to find the information we need while being bombarded with flashy graphics is very distracting, which is why I'm a strong advocate of AdBlock Plus. I hope the author of AdBlocker Plus does not change the FireFox Plugin, forcing the advertising industry to change the way it advertises. A simple Bolded text headline will do, with an unbolded paragraph below explaining in more detail the service/product being offered.
Nothing pisses me off more than my time being wasted and attention distracted. The advertising world needs to respect people, and if it doesn't, then more really useful plugins like AdBlocker Plus will become mainstream. Here's another note to web administrators and advertisers: If I can't circumvent the obtrusive flash-based advertisements, I stop going to that website. Seriously, the industry needs to change.
Also, Kudos to NoScript!
OK, end of my rant/tirade.
Thus, I don't give a damn if or how I get modded (I'm fine as long as my opinion doesn't go unnoticed by).
To me, this looks like the author is just hoping (or already has) to gain profit from advertisers by not blocking them by default.
Don't change anything, for the love of God! Let users have their freedom, whether 'tis by choosing from subscription filters, or by filtering out individual advertiserson their own.
Don't give the advertisers any edge in bypassing your filters - that'll just make AdBlock redunant and useless.
-- Chaos, panic, pandemonium... My job here is done!
Sites could feature a small reminder or post to whitelist the site. Appealing to altruism would be effective, although I really doubt the ads are going to generate any money.
As long as my ISP insists on capping my bandwidth, I am not going to use it to download ads. For all intents and purposes, I *am* paying for the content. 44.95 a month.
But, with that said, if I visit a site often and their ads are unobtrusive (i.e. small and unmoving), I would consider enabling them.
-Kinsey
I use adblock plus because of two other reasons, security, and until recently being on dialup it made pages actually load like within one day or something. Really, web pages have become so bloated now that for dialup users it's like being way back in 95 or something. And the security angle is legit, too many ads have been proven to be vectors for malware.
Personally I have nothing against ads, as long as they are plain text. Anything else, including active javascript or flash based ads, or animated gifs, I don't want to see or load them. If the content is good, they have my eyeballs, if the ads are in good taste, relevant to the site, and don't abuse my security or force me to try and load full megabyte a page crap (like those 'click for the next page' websites, frequently linked to in articles here, when it is a slim paragraph of text and 9/10ths of the page is ad), then OK, none of that crap, I will check them out. If it is something I am interested in, fine, if not, fine, same as ads on TV or radio. I've never bought a used car from any of those obnoxious screaming car salesman type TV or radio ads, and won't do that from any website either. Too loud and flashy and it crosses the line into being annoying, that is what adblock is for. And all the javascript proponents in the web0sphere have yet to come up with secure javascript, it is totally INsecure, so I mostly block that on general principles and do a very careful whitelist for exceptions and it is always temporary, don't have a single site on permanent "allow". These doo doo heads brought blocking their stuff on themselves by crossing many lines into serious bogus and stupid land.
Palant's proposal could be more acceptable if it actually went further. I really object to the high-motion 'video' adverts, but find static images are often ok. Why not tag the ads as 'motion', 'static', and perhaps some content classification to indicate visual 'safety' (such as kid-safe). Sites that violate would be rapidly blacklisted, and so is an incentive to comply with correct tags and not cheat. What about a tag or list of OSS sites that need our support, and block the commercial sites. Aim to establish a 3-way contract between the visitor, the web site an the advertiser and feed. If I (the viewer) can establish my own viewing policy, I would be more likely to participate. What happened to the obscure feature in the earlier Adblock (not plus) that allowed me to upload the add, but not to see it? From the advertiser's view, this looked like a hit. Is this ethical? Do I care? Is the advertiser being equally ethical in his sneaky ads?
I'm pretty positive that if a user has already installed adblocking software, they don't respect the site owners opposition to adblocking. Seriously, do admins think they will change their mind the second time around?
I have a better idea.
How about we allow such a META tag, alright, but also provide some way for the content authors to specifically identify all ads on their page as such in the markup? And come up with a social contract of a kind: you have the right to request me to view or not view your ads, but only if you tell me where the ads are in your page. If I chose to refuse your request, then all HTML elements on the page identified as ads are hidden (so no need for URL-based blacklists in that case, and this can obviously handle all kinds of inline-expanded ads, too).
Of course, this would be abused (either by not tagging ads as ads, or by tagging non-ads as ads). So here's the catch: let users register their complaints in a centralized way. If one particular site has lots of abuses reported, it is added to the blacklist of misbehaving sites, for which there's no "Do you want to view ads on this page?" prompt at all, and adblocking is enabled by default (using the URL blacklists).
"an in-line dialog box noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking. The user would then have to choose to respect that wish or not."
All websites that have advertising want that advertising to be seen, otherwise it wouldn't be there. People don't want to see these adverts -- that's why they use Adblock. The proposed dialog box is stupid and pointless.
I think a better idea is to offer the option of contributing a small amount of money equivalent to what the ad revenue would have been. If you're using an adblock it's because you don't like ads. However I'd say it's worthwhile to be able to pay to keep the site alive.
74 minutes after Adblock Plus-Minus was released, a Greasemonkey script was released to remove the new tag from all websites visited.
Property is theft.
I don't care about you.
I don't care about your business model.
I do care about the bandwidth that I paid for, and that you are using to deliver ads. The bandwidth and time required to download and view your ads takes away from MY bandwidth and time.
If my not viewing ads causes you to go out of business, I DON'T CARE.
I pay to support sites (and services) I care about. If you give your shit away for free, don't be surprised when people actually take it.
The internet existed before you, and will continue to exist without you.
-ted
Sure, but once you make a well-known tool to automatically do this, the advertisers will find a way to detect and ignore such downloads (though I guess it still has the nice side-effect of wasting their bandwidth regardless). Thus this can only be done on a small scale, with people writing their own tools to do this and not making them well-known.
The only thing that makes less sense than this is converting AdBlock into an ad-supported service.
I don't understand why this isn't the case by default, but Firefox I think is going to need a permissions / sandbox environment for extensions. The idea of AdBlock looking through my histroy just gives me the willies.
Something similar to Java's JNLP/Webstart, where plugins could request permission to view specific features, and the user could decide to deny them. The request could come up when the extension is installed, and could also be prompted for a one-time use.
Specific areas that would really benefit from protection include:
An extension could have some or all of these blocked. For example, I'd like to be able to prevent an extension from ever opening a page or tab on restart (Thanks, I know I upgraded, I don't want to visit your page...), but still allow it to add a right-click menu item.
The restrictions could be an intelligent hierarchy, so that an extension could pick a subset of them, and request them. The more features an extension wants to accept, the higher the warning level when being installed. (i.e.: if an extension wants , then it gets flagged red, if it only wants one or two [excluding history, bookmarks, forms, or passwords], then it gets no flag at all.)
This is silly; of course every website that is showing ads wants you to see them. If successful, a feature like this would only lead to every page having the "Can I please spam you?" tag, which will only succeed in training people to blindly click "no" (until they figure out how to permanently disable it).
A better solution is for websites and ad providers to be less obnoxious with their ads, so that people don't feel so compelled to block them. I'm perfectly ok with somebody showing me a narrow banner, or an unintrusive panel with text links. What really ruins it for me, and I suspect the average user, is all the javascript and Flash crap, popping up windows, popping up tooltips, making pages load slow, etc. It's a usability issue. Ads that try to take too much advantage only turn people off. For every sale that an obnoxious ad generates, it also puts the product and company on somebody's do-not-buy list.
Anyone can disable ABP for a page. Some sites have earned me downloading their ads (phoronix xbitlabs ./)
I wonder how would be the "active decision about ad blocking". Like,
Do you want to display ads from MAKE_A_LOT_OF_MONEY_FAST_CALL_1_800_MONEY, Inc.?
Time to play around with FF extensions development to do the fork...
No 3rd party adhosting/adserving.
It's the only way to get the ads seen as adding the sites doing this to the HOSTS file will 'hide' them from the user who does this.
Otherwise people will just block ads from sites like DoubleClick and it will be business as usual.
Remember the original Adblock? Me neither.
100% of the value in ABP is the fact that it blocks ads. As soon as that changes, I and everyone else who cares to will switch to ABPP, which I guarantee you will show up within a day or two.
My own personal mod troll strikes again. It must really burn you guys up to know that even with several of you, I can still keep ahead of you. My sincerest thanks go out to all of you out there moderating funny comments as "Insightful" or "Informative" as appropriate — you know who you are.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Yeah, because those blacklisted URLs come from a huge team of Adblock Inc.'s employees... /sarcasm
The users of the open versions would be reporting the ads they see. But I bet there'd be less users willing to help the non-free version all of a sudden. Then they would need a staff to keep up.
If you made it a game where the people who report the regexps that get the best score (most blocks, fewest false positives) get rewards you'd probably even do better than the proprietary programs. Just recognition as ad-fighters and some donated goodies.
Not to mention that decoding a list like that is pretty trivial no matter how they encrypt it because you're running it on your computer and can just watch their software to see what it does.
Adblock is a solution to the wrong problem, and this change is an annoying refinement on solving the wrong problem.
I like the sites I visit. I'm happy if they get paid. If I don't download ads, I'm screwing the people whose sites I enjoy.
I don't like the ads. I don't want to see them. But really, I don't care if my browser downloads them while I'm reading.
Solution: something exactly like Adblock, but which downloads the ads *without* displaying them. The advertiser can't tell whether I actually looked at their pixels with my eyeballs.
Everybody I care about wins. I don't have to look at ads. The site owner gets paid by the advertiser. The advertiser gets totally screwed: they pay for hosting, but get no advertising value. It's a win/win/fsckyou situation!
1) Will be severely abused by content providers.
2) As a consequence of #1, users will be nagged to death if they browse through a lot of unseen sites such as when searching (unless there is an option to disable the nag policy).
3) There already exists the capacity to white list, if users wish to view a site's ads.
4) This contradicts the perceived purpose of the software that users hold and their goals: to block ads which is why they took the time to install it in the first place.
5) The people who put the effort into blocking ads are not the ones who you want to target anyway since they are least likely to bother clicking. It's wasted bandwidth on both ends.
6) It's open source. Piss off the community of users and it will get forked in an instant.
If he's really dead set on doing it, compromise by making it a non-default option.
I agree with the grandparent post. Actually I posted a similar reply elsewhere, then found this.
Ugh. No. Maybe it's just me, but my browsing experience slows way down waiting for all the various ad server domains to resolve.
Just do what Adblock does, and download all the content I care about, and display the page. While I'm reading, continue resolving domains and downloading content in the background.
bandwidth wasted on ads
Who cares? The user doesn't usually pay by the megabyte. The ad provider does, but fsck 'em.
once you make a well-known tool to automatically do this, the advertisers will find a way to detect and ignore such downloads
The only way to make sure that I actually saw your ad, that the pixels were actually displayed on my screen and the photons went into my eyeballs, is to make me click on it or interact with it in some way.
They work based on which ads get clicked on or generate sales.
In principle I can make my browser simulate a click on an ad too, if I want to.
I hold all the cards. The advertiser isn't sitting over my shoulder, they have no way to know whether they're interacting with a real human or a roboclient. They'd have to do a Turing test to figure out if I'm a real human, but they can't because real humans refuse to take Turing tests.
Though now that I think about it, "Punch the monkey to win a car!" is a pretty good Turing test which some humans will gladly take. Not me, though.
I have been running Win7RC/Avast/FFox/ABP on a Acer One 8.9 intel n270 Atom with a 160hd and 1 gig of ram. It slows to a craw when some website has animated ads/flash/excessive pop ups. I have been careful to keep all the mail ware off of of it to maintain a reasonable performance level for surfing. Not everyone has the fastest QuadCore and 8 gigs of ram that some of these pages want to run. (ok my Core2, 2Ghz, 4gig ram laptop works better, but I can't get 5-6 hrs of runtime out of something 4 times the weight!)
My PDA doesn't support flash, but does spend a lot of time to download some pages - 1 meg of xfer for what I want 15k of text, sometimes will bring it to a halt - make me miss phone calls, ect. I sometimes have to soft reset just to get out of a bad site. Too much of the time a PDA specific site does not have what I am looking for, or I am just redirected to a static page saying we don't support that browser. A 640x480 VGA screen, 520mhz CPU, 100 megs of ram on a high speed data connection should look and run ok! When I turn off the images/ads it runs lightning fast, but on a PDA it is a all or nothing. There is not a ABP for PDAs.
I have no problem killing all ads! They have gone from a minor footprint 15k banner ads - to multi-megabyte flash, mail ware laden, computer slowing trash!. I have NOT had a mail ware infection since I stated using FF/ABP!
My guess would be that this would be an option that would default to "on", but could be turned off by the user.
How about a 'defer ads' option that would store all these ads that I ignore whilst resenting the advertising company? They could then be shown at a time more convenient for me to ignore and resent the advertising company.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Lol. Does he really think he gets trough with this? And does he really think we care to follow his lead?
He's cool, for making the thing in the first place. But I can fork it in what? Five minutes? Then I diff his updates, take out the stuff I do not want, patch my fork, perhaps add one additional cool feature, or fix a bug, and upload it. There. Done. ^^
My standpoint is: Advertisement is no finance model. Ever. It can not work. Period. :)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Lame. If I don't want ads to the point that I go install adblock, why would I want to undo that? If the site has a loyal group that wants to view ads, they already have the means to whitelist. Also, a website can put a plea 'please show our ads even though we know you will not clickthrough' on a site now. If adblock ends up pestering me - it's fork time, and the first cool mod would be autoblocking of sites with 'no really, do you want to see some ads?' tagging to support this stupidity...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What about a way of communicating to sites the ad formats a user is willing to accept? Breakdown ads into format categories such as animation, image, text, and unknown perhaps with subtypes in major categories where appropriate. That way those of us who want to support a site but cannot tolerate multimedia ads could, for example, select "text" for a particular site and be shown unobtrusive text ads.
Something like this would seem to be a decent compromise. From the comments I've read on various Slashdot articles on the subject, it would seem there are large numbers of people willing to allow at least text and other non-obtrusive ads.
Check it out -- http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11906
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Why is everyone acting like he is about to try to pull a fast one like the Noscript guy? His proposal is actually very modest and fair. All he is talking about is not blocking a little message from the web admin that basically says "please support our site if you like it by pressing this button to add us to you ABP whitelist" and that is all.
I don't see what the harm or problem with that approach is. I would still have to choose to press the little button on the page to add them to my whitelist, and if they showed me even ONE of those damned "shoot the monkey and win an iPod!" or "You are the 1 millionth visitor!" irritating as hell flash ads they would be on my blacklist again so fast it would make their head swim. But simply giving them a chance to make a little plea seems quite fair to me. If the guy that writes Noscript would have simply popped up a message that says 'It is costing me a lot to support Noscript. Please press this button to add me to you Adblock Whitelist so I can keep making this product" I would have been happy to press the button and support his site.
But IMHO the websites only have themselves to blame. Back in the old days ( cue my oldest saying "When everyone listened to 8-tracks and dinosaurs ruled the earth) ads were some basic text, maybe a static image or if they wanted to be fancy a .gif. Now they are these irritating multimedia flashing beeping blipping popping over and under and sideways noisy as hell monstrosities. I mean is it any wonder folks want to avoid them like the clap? Everyone I do a house call for to fix a PC and whip out my portable Firefox with ABP the first thing folks say after "how come you don't have all those damned blinking ads?" is "Can I have that too?" because folks are frankly tired of 1 page's worth of text being spread over 14 pages so damned drowned in ads finding the article is like playing Where's Waldo.
But allowing a simple text plea sounds fair to me as long as Wlad makes it just as easy to put them back on the blacklist if they hit me with those damned bling bling ads. And whomever "invented" those irritating as hell flash ads should be buried up to his neck in AOL CDs and forced to listen to Bonzi Buddy tell those same three jokes for all eternity.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
If this feature is introduced I am personally starting a fork.
In an advertising saturated world, Adblock is the only reason that keeps me using Firefox no matter what.
What's this nonsense of "choice"? I've already made a choice by installing AdBlock. How much clearer can the "I don't want to see your stupid ads" message be?
What they've done is invent the double-opt-out.
Fuck you. If I care, I'll opt-in. I have yet to see a single case where opt-out was the adequate procedure. It really is that simple, just like firewall rules. DEFAULT DENY and then go from there is the only reasonable route.
So, the fact that you can't opt-out because they don't ask you in the first place is why I installed AdBlock. I see no reason whatsoever to opt out again, nor do I want to be asked if I want to opt-in. If I wanted to, I'd disable AdBlock.
Geesh. Got it? It's not that difficult.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I install it and subscribe to block them... and if I want to allow them I can already do it page by page already....
I DON'T need another pop-up to beg me....
locked out of this slashdot account for 10+ years... Im back
NO.
It could be worse. They could make it a subscription service for webmasters to participate in this or something like this.
They could, except the whole point of the extension is to say "no" to ads. No means "No, and don't nag me until I say Yes".
How about an AdClick plugin to download all ads from selected sites without displaying them?
Does anyone still use Junkbuster? I found it quite useful a while back. I suppose it wouldn't take much work to get it back up to snuff with easylist or something similar.
What is the point of having the META tag then? Why are they discriminating between users who have a meta tag and those who don't? Will web developers have to stay wondering whether increasing the size of their HTML is going to reap enough benefits? Can't they just do the same thing for ALL sites, irrelevant of the META tag or not? It's pretty obvious that if someone puts up ads on their website, they want people to view them and be interested in them.
A whitelist of approved advertisers isn't a bad idea. You could set the criteria to anything you like (i.e. no flash, no animated gifs, nothing over a certain size, no scripts, nothing adult rated etc) and then ad servers could apply to join if they agree to your rules.
To be honest though I'd probably still just block everything.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"If they turn around and say "Unblock or stop accessing", then that's perfectly within their "rights""
I agree with you in a very broad principle. It's also within my rights to ignore them.
If I use the definition at Wikipedia "A right is a legal or moral entitlement or permission.", then what I think is that their only right is to ask my nicely to look at their ads. Certainly not legally (at least not yet). I'd like to hear your argument as to why it's a moral right to compel me to view the ad.
The way I look at things is like this: I can surely put up an appealing ad on my site. I can't force anyone to look at it, no matter how much I might like people to.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
One site I've been to has picture ads and text ads under them. So normal people see the picture ads and the adblockers get to look at text ads.
The original AdBlock extension had this feature. I don't know where it went in AdBlock Plus.
Looks like we might need a new product called ABP Block Plus.
Hi.
To me this new tag idea is an arm-race. Add that "feature" in AddBlock Plus, and wait a day until an "AddBlock ++" gets out, and enables user... to block adds without questions. It sounds ridiculous. Yes webmaster will immediately use this meta-tag everywhere. The main problem is not the add, but it's intrusiveness.
Wouldn't it be better for AddBlock Plus to accept by default a known format. Like (at random) 100x100 pix div format, pure text, 500 chars long ,no pics, no multimedia, no absolut location... The only way an would go through for sure, would be this single standardised format.
This way 1) I the user would not ever have to make any active white/black list decision: this is and absolute show stopper because way too many decisions to be made 2) would actually see and read the short text - as I do on Google sponsored links 3) adds publishers could go through without the hassle of being filtered 4) add publisher would give up all stupid and fancy flash/pics : so much cheaper.
Bye.
Z.
First, this is obviously stupid, like suggesting a "noblink" tag that asks the user if they want to stop tags from working on a website.
Second, if you are *dependent* on advertising, THESE PEOPLE DON'T CARE. They don't want to know. Call them freeloaders, thieves or whatever, but they get enough abuse from other (possibly worse) advertisers and they no longer pay heed to advertising anyway. Thus they would be a wasted impression of an advert. It's like the telemarketers who *insist* on calling me just minutes after I told them not to. You *really* think I'm just going to change my mind and buy something from you?
The websites that do sell advertising space have to think for a second: How long would I last in any other type of business if I relied on selling advertising space to recoup all my expenses? The answer can be measured in microseconds. At one point, there was an "ad-supported" UK ISP that offered free dialup (back in the days of 56k) for the cost of a toolbar displaying ads on your desktop. It was *really* quite good for many years and then tanked. That was the LARGEST company I have ever seen which has been able to survive solely by selling advertisement space (with the possible exception of Google, who have BILLIONS of users and an unrivalled search engine technology that actually GAVE them that power - if you get to compete with them, you'll never have to worry about money ever again anyway).
Give it up. Selling advertising space is not a business income. It's possibly a small sideline for a large website that's *already* successful by other means and that's it.
And finally, a reminder to the /. people that their fucking unicode parser is broken.
It's not broken, it's fucking the unicode good and proper.
This is what should lead to micropayments. You can look at the ads, or pay a fraction of a cent to remove them. That seems fair, and gives people a free alternative.
Isn't this the same guy who railed on the NoScript creator for unblocking his ads? Has he realized he wants a part of the action himself now, as well?
In TFS it says the box is "in line", not a popup. My guess with a description like that is it will take the page real estate that the ad would normally take, and not interfere (provided it doesn't get the ability to act like a pop-under, and I doubt it will).
What's the problem with this? If you don't like it, don't click the button. It gives you an option to support the sites you like by displaying their ads, and ignore ads on the remaining sites you don't find worth it.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Mod parent up - that'd clear my conscience too!
If a site put the Ad there, it is safe to assume they want you to see it; if i installed AdBlock it is save to assume I don't.
The main situation the current system dose not cover is: some sites (like /., Google) almost certainly would prefer me to participate even with no ads then go strait to their competitors. Other sites would prefer me not to use their bandwidth. A meta tag for this might be useful.
The basic idea of an option to prompt for an allow exception after X visits in Y days seems sound - no need to involve the site.
I've read a few comments here that talk about Wladimir Palant's desire, in writing Adblock, to restore some sort of parity to website advertising. A rather noble goal and pretty logical idea.
However...
The goals of the vast majority of people who are running website ads are not noble. And their only logic is to get you to either view and click on that ad. The parity that websites provide content even thou it's our bandwidth that we use to view them does not really matter to them. How many times have I seen plays on this same theme: "If your not viewing our ads your stealing content."
Gah, with that mentality there is little room for parity. They, the collective they, are going to try to screw me over with as many ads as they can get away with in exchange for the content. They have been doing it, and are very comfortable with that model, for many years now in media.
But the catch is with my internet I get to control what I see by in large. And as such I'm blocking everything I can. Via my hosts file, plugins, or whatever other means I can utilize. Until content providers understand that it's my time that they get to compeat for with their content. "If your showing me obnoxious ads during the content your stealing my time." Is what they have to learn.
Of course that will never really happen imo. The public by in large are too complacent to really put up a fight against the media. But in my little corner of the world they get nothing. Nothing.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
What he said.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
As long as the extension offered users an option to set a preference that they wanted to never see the popups, and always hide the ads anyway.
What part of "NO G*DD*MNED ADS" do you not understand?
Sheesh
I disagree. If I wanted to see ads I wouldn't have installed ABP in the first place.
I don't want to click no on every site I visit for the first time. It's a PITA. As much so as seeing the ads themselves.
This idea is stupid.
No, because then you're just ripping off advertisers. If this approach caught on, price-per-impression for ads will plummet. You'll destroy the pay-per-impression market.
You want to know how to keep people from blocking your ads? Keep them as a small banner (or text), at a consistent size, at the top or bottom of the page, and no animation, tracking crap, or flash. Oh, wait. That's exactly how it used to be. You all decided to start with the nonsense, though. And then we found a way to stop you from doing it to us. You reap what you sow. Advertisements, I'm sure, would never have been blocked in the first place had you not been so damned obnoxious with them.
So now, even if you were to go back to unobtrusive banner ads, we would never see them. That's your own damned fault.
If it did anything remotely annoying someone would immediately fork the code to make it quit doing that.
...or you could just turn off the dialog in your ABP preferences.
Great idea. Let's also add a "rape ok" sticker to our driver's license.. you know, kinda like the organ donor thing.
"Yes, if you drug me and kidnap me, please rape me too. It's ok."
I don't mind text ads, and static graphical banners i can tolerate..
On the other hand i don't like flash ads, and absolutely detest ads with sound (they interfere with whatever else i might be listening to), any kind of popups are also incredibly annoying.
So do what I do, and just run Flashblock (I run nothing else). Now the pages you visit can make SOME ad revenues without driving you insane, plus you get the security of no flash hijacking. And if you decide you want to see the content, you click on the button (or add the site to the whitelist).
I consider Flashblock to be the ultimate compromise, because it's one that advertisers and I can definitely live with. And since I like my web free as in beer, I'm willing to do what I can...within reason.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
... and replaced it with the Super-Minimalistic Department of Super Redundancy and Checks and Balances See-Saw Redundancy Department.
Then we'll need another newer tag.
Two words: /etc/hosts
I have never run AdBlock on any system (98% of my browsing is Safari on OS X) and I still see very few ads. Is it as good as AdBlock, or as easily configurable? Maybe not, and no. Does it do a pretty awesome job, with every browser on the system, with nearly no configuration EVER needed, and no per-browser setup required? Yes. And also block lots of spyware and adware? Yes.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I love adblock but if it starts to interfere with my browsing with popups, I'll uninstall it immediately and use an alternative, or hack my own.
I don't even have the same perception of the Web as the other people. I can browse without having my brain cells burned by all those flashing ads and shit. Everytime I have to use someone else's computer I miss my adblock.
I know the web sites need financing and publicity is their moneymaker, bla, bla, bla. Yeah, right, but it's not my fault. If this business model doesn't work, find another. Just stop flashing those ads all over me.
I just wish I could get some other adblocks, maybe in the future:
I don't have the time to learn about all the fantastic things they're trying to sell me, and I don't have the money to buy them, anyway.
There is no difference (other than media) between an ABP filterset and a set of pages custom-cut to fit over a particular edition of a newspaper or magazine and block the print of all advertisements therein, leaving non-advertisement text and pictures visible via cut-outs.
Let's say you obtain said magazine and page-by-age place the "PABP" (paper ad-block plus) "filters" such that you can read the entire magazine without ever setting eyes on a single advertisement. Is this illegal? Immoral? Unethical? I can't see how it is. Doesn't matter if the magazine is sold or given away for free. Once you get it, it's yours and you can look at any part of it you like.
In the paper publishing world, delivery of the "substrate" media (the magazine, newspaper, etc) is exactly equivalent to delivery of the advertising media. They cannot be separated. The advertiser, therefore, knows that his message has been delivered and counts on its positioning and his own unique presentation to make it eye-catching enough that the reader notices.
In the electronic publishing world, some genius decided to separate the advertisements from the content. Where previously it would have impossibly difficult to block the ads (who is patient enough to make a paper cut-out for every page of a magazine and carefully place it so that only the articles' text shows through?), now blocking is only a matter of applying a series of regular expressions. But the same principle applies. Once you've downloaded the "substrate" content (i.e. the pages hosting the advertisements), you are under no obligation follow any of the links. It's YOUR bandwidth, not the advertisers. If anything, the advertisers are stealing from YOU when they download commercial media without your consent.
The real problem is this: Advertisers are lazy. They are faced with a new type of media and are unwilling to invest the time and money to fully integrate the advertising with the "substrate." It's not impossible, and it doesn't have to be expensive. Look at the Hemmingway mock-prose competition that gets held every year. The contestants are required to incorporate the name of the sponsor in every submission, or the submission is disqualified. And for the price of a few trophies and a little PR, the sponsor of that contest gets amazing amounts of advertising.
Unfortunately, really integrating advertising with its "substrate" media takes a lot of thought and effort. So basically it boils down to a bunch of stupid lazy individuals who would rather point fingers at "evil users" than do their jobs. Sorry, fellas. The Whinery Tour starts every hour on the hour. Queue up under the sign with the picture of Sour Grapes.
But nobody is saying you'll have to click no, as we are talking about an opt in not an opt out. And that sounds fair. It makes it easy for those that don't really know how to add stuff to the ABP whitelist (like my 67 year old dad who loves his ABP and thinks a PC is "broken" if he doesn't have it) while at the same time leaving the default adblocking behavior alone. So really, what's not fair or right about this?
You will simply have a small block of text with a button at the top or bottom of the webpage, placed there by the webadmin. It won't be like a toolbar on your browser or a pop up, but more like a bit of text on the page you are viewing. It will simply say something like "please support my site if you like it by pressing this button to add my site to your ABP whitelist" and then you are free to ignore it or press it...your call. It still leaves the default behavior in your hands and gives you a butt simple button to push if you actually like a site and want to support it.
It seems completely fair to me and will give a chance for honest web admins to make their case directly to the viewer while at the same time giving the choice to us, the web surfer to allow or deny their request. Don't worry, if you want to never see an ad again nobody says you will have to opt out or push the button. Just ignore the text on the website and everything is just as it is now.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You're right, the proposal isn't bad. But my response was mostly aimed at the parent to my post, and in defense of the "isn't open source grand?" line.
Adblock is (a) popular and (b) designed around something selfish.* For both those reasons, it's not the sort of project that a larger percentage of users will have an irrational love for. If it stops doing its job, one of the many other options will step up to take its place, or there will be a fork.
I think maybe the maintainer is worried about it exploding too much. He figures that by making the default a little friendlier to webmasters, people new to ABP will at least see some ads but anyone that wants to can go totally clean.
It's an interesting slope that things slip down as they become more conservative to better fit the masses. Ah well.
* I block ads. I have for a long time. Selfish might be the wrong word. I don't know what the right one is.
I do block things that stall a load, yes.
But the biggie for me is *)(^$# blinking!
I don't mind ads.
I understand why they're there.
I use them myself.
But for crying out loud, blinking/animation isn't just calling attention to itself, it's distracting!
(And I need to acknowledge some bias due to having seen 486's brought to their knees servicing the blinking gifs on a single page . . )
I'd even be willing to have a setting in my browser that says, "non-pornographic, still ads, without cookies accepted". No, I won't accept a site-by-site cookie for this.
But one scrap of blink, and I block.
hawk
"I expect to see this meta tags on most sites in the near future." - by El_Muerte_TDS (592157) on Monday May 11, @06:08PM (#27914165) Homepage
You're most likely dead-on right, but, from what I understood here from all of this? It can be altered by the user quickly, & only bother them/set them @ risk, ONCE, because the user can change it quickly enough (because adbanners have been known to be infested w/ malicious code & even MS has been "hit" by this, with many others)...
Problem here/inferiority to HOSTS files here? Well, this only works on MOZILLA variants (FireFox)... not other browser, email programs, OR others you may utilize.
However, by way of comparison?
HOSTS files provide security benefits here, & speed too as a bonus, vs. not only adbanners, but also vs. malicious code bearing websites, from a SINGLE POINT OF CONTROL THAT EXTENDS TO ALL OF YOUR WEBBOUND PROGRAMS, not just FireFox/Mozilla variants to which this addon only is available for...
HOSTS files, customized ones, work here... & it's a solution that's easily edited/added to, + understood by users, as a bonus!
(Because as one of my best pals whom I 'turned onto' these has stated, verbatim? "All you need to do, is know how to use notepad.exe, how to read english, & to get a decent one to start with - as well as sources that update the data one needs to blockout bogus sites", & I list a few below!)
(Use a custom HOSTS file, along with stalling javascript's indiscriminate usage on EVERY website a user visits (because it's truly the "root of all evil" here most times, & anyone can verify that statement @ SECUNIA or SECURITYFOCUS.COM for example, from their last 4-5 yrs. of data or more on records of exploits they have) can stall MOST attacks vs. your system, extending even to EMAIL programs, not just a single browser, as is the case w/ AdBlock...)
(HOSTS files work, via blocking KNOWN bad adbanners &/or websites, from a CENTRAL source that extends to all your webbound apps (not just individual browsers &/or webbased programs (email mainly, this is an attack vector too if HTML mail & scripting is allowed)))
I populated it with my own lists for HOSTS files since 1997 (30.000 entries long, mostly for adbanner blocking @ first 1997-2001), then later for security 2002 onwards...
I extended it further (to 654,000 unique entries currently & yes, I have to stop the Windows DNS client for that, it's 14mb for Windows NT/2000/XP/Server 2003, & up to 19mb (using 0.0.0.0) OR 26mb (using 127.0.0.1) for Windows VISTA/Server 2008/Windows7) per sources like:
1.) StopBadWare.org
2.) SRI
3.) Dancho Danchev's ZDNet Blog
4.) SpyBot "Search & Destroy" Immunize lists
5.) , + other reputable known HOSTS files shown @ wikipedia.com, here ->
All nearly DAILY updated here.
(& kept free of repeat entries via a program I wrote to do that, as well as alphabetize the entries, plus change them to a "faster up off disk into memory" internal schema for blocking out bad sites & adbanners, by going from the larger, slower 127.0.0.1 default loopback adapter IP, to either 0.0.0.0 (for VISTA/Server2k8/Windows 7, a mistake on MS' part I mentioned to they here -> http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/02/09/recognizing-improvements-in-windows-7-handwriting.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage [msdn.com] which they started on 12/09/2008), OR the fastest & most efficient 0 blocking IP address))
HOSTS files are a good layer for this, then you can also "layer on" IE Restricted Zones, Opera filter.ini/urlfilter.ini, & FireFox addons like NoScript + its internal to browser restricted sites lists ontop of them, for the utmost in security protection AND speed (I do other things like use custom cascading style sheets & PAC file filtering as well, b
but not enough to pay for it.
If Slashdot went to a subscription only model, I would stop using it.
Capitalism can be a real bitch.
-ted