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."

Comments

Re:Two different ways to read this.

[meringuoid]

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.

OK, you see that big red stop-sign icon at the top right? See the little down-arrow to the right of it? Click on that. See how it drops down a menu?

Now, see where it says 'Disable on tech.slashdot.org'? That will disable Adblock Plus on all pages served from tech.slashdot.org. Handy, eh? You can even call up that menu from the main page and then it says 'Disable on slashdot.org' so you can enable ads across the whole site!

Then, whenever you're on a site where the ads are not being blocked, the red stop-sign icon turns into a green go-sign, and the ads appear. Easy!

Re:Fine with me, as long as it's an option

[Todd Knarr]

Hardly. If you read the proposal, you'll notice that even when the flag's present ABP will not present ads by default. And it won't even immediately prompt you, let alone prompt you every time. It first checks whether you visit the site often. If it sees repeated visits recently, then it brings up a bar at the bottom giving you three options: "Let me see how the site looks with ads.", "Keep blocking the ads and don't ask me about this site ever again." and "Keep blocking the ads, but ask me about it next time it qualifies.". If you choose to see how it looks, then you get the site with ads and two options: "Add an exception for this site." and "Keep blocking ads for this site.". So ABP's never, even with the tag, going to allow ads through by default. And with the repeat-visitor logic, it shouldn't even be popping up the question bar too often (unless you keep using the "Ask me later." option).

I'd prefer it to unblock by service (eg. let me tell it "Allow Google AdSense text-only ads through regardless of site."), but as it stands the proposal is hardly a neutering of ABP in any way.

Re:Time for a fork

[Scrameustache]

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.

Take a breather there, buddy. I don't know why the /. overlords FAILed to include a link to the adblockplus page relevant to the discussion, but here it is: http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking

Then, the part of that page that covers your fears: The user should have the final decision. If we allow webmasters to specify which ads the user should view or whether users with Adblock Plus should be allowed to visit their sites, they will try to maximize their profits â" and very soon users will be confronted with intrusive ads everywhere or locked out of all sites. At which point somebody will fork Adblock Plus to âoemake it work againâ and we are back at square one.

And finally, a reminder to the /. people that their fucking unicode parser is broken.