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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."
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!"
Nope - they're providing additional functionality to webmasters, so that they can go and say "Hey ABP user, you've been here a couple times, please consider allowing the ads to be displayed here"
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.
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.
Riiiiight. Because when it's other site's ad income you're negating it's about ideals and the rights of the users. But when it's your site's income it's because your service on your web site is automatically so much more beneficial than Google or Slashdot.
... you defend NoScript after attacking AdBlock for a lesser crime (merely asking you if you would consider viewing ads after visiting a site many times). What exactly is your angle? I think we may have the first case of Firefox extension fanboism on our hands here, folks.
Your position is interesting
My work here is dung.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What about the tremendous service the other sites provide for free? I let sites show me advertising in exchange for giving me free content, because I think that's a better deal than having to pay for it directly. I don't use an ad blocker, and I haven't even disabled my Slashdot ads (although I could probably make the case that I've actually earned that right on this specific forum).
NoScript doesn't provide more of a service than the content-generating sites you're visiting. If someone makes their ads more obnoxious than you can tolerate, then don't go back there.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Your position is interesting ... you defend NoScript after attacking AdBlock for a lesser crime (merely asking you if you would consider viewing ads after visiting a site many times). What exactly is your angle? I think we may have the first case of Firefox extension fanboism on our hands here, folks.
Hmm, I didn't attack AdBlock. I did mean to say that it was redundant and pointless for AdBlock to prompt users as long as the same users also run NoScript. I did also say that I prefer NoScript over AdBlock, but I wouldn't call that an "attack".
As for NoScript's meddling with AdBlock, my personal belief is that is okay as long as the meddling involves only the showing of NoScript's as since I am using NoScript for free. I wouldn't mind if AdBlock meddled with NoScript to show AdBlock's, and only AdBlock's, own ads.
I am not a FF plugin fanboy. If NoScript and AdBlock accepted deals from advertisers and things gradually become worse (as they almost always do over time) then I'd ditch FF entirely and go the Chrome route.
So that's my angle.
Having been on the Internet before all the businesses realized they could make a buck with it, I realize that the "free Web" was actually better for not having ads on it. Most of the sites that support themselves through advertising could disappear tomorrow, and no one would miss them; the only exception that comes to mind is Google, whose ads are non-intrusive enough that even people who don't like ads can tolerate them.
What I have to wonder is, are the AdBlock Plus folks getting kickbacks in return for this new "functionality"?
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Getting raped in prison was kinda dirty, but I don't see it as being hypocritical given the tremendous service (protection, etc) which I was given for free.
If you really want 'no script', turn it off in Firefox. But I'm not willing to 'let it slide' because of how I've been helped in the past. Hopefully someone will rise up and write a "NoScript2" which does the same thing minus the kick in the teeth.
Why not sending first a Pop-Up on the publisher's computer to ask whether he is certain he wants to advertise?!?
It seems stupid.
noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking
If the publisher desired their ads not to be seen, they wouldn't have put them on the site.
Dual Opteron < $600
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.
You look like spam.
Pretty much it.
Personally I don't mind ads on sites if they are non-intrusive (those floating ads ARE intrusive). As someone who has run sites in the past for gaming clans/guilds/etc I can assure you that the meager revenue generated by hosting ads does help, and even if it's on a larger corporate scale it's the site's right to show the ads.
Think about it like this - just as you have a right to block the ads, the site has a right to block your access if you block their ads. No, I do not particularly like advertising, but it's there for a purpose.
If you don't believe the site should be generating revenue, or that the ads are too intrusive, then don't go there... I don't go to Wired anymore for both of these reasons
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.
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.
Then you come to the issue of how the ad placement and content messes up your website because you're not using Internet Explorer. These ads can screw up the page layout, making the user's experience with the website just out-and-out suck.
OCO is Loco
If you check out the blog post ( http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking ) this originates from , the "pop-up" is like firefox's password save prompt, not an annoying separate window. He also mentions that he'll probably go with a master checkbox to disable this new feature. Personally, I just use the "disable on this site" feature built into the Adblock icon on the toolbar if I want to show ads for a site (which I do for some sites if the ads aren't too intrusive), so I don't see this new "feature" having any impact on my user experience. Still, I can appreciate the effort to encourage people to allow unobtrusive ads on sites they frequent, so long as the option is still left to the user.
As for NoScript's meddling with AdBlock, my personal belief is that is okay as long as the meddling involves only the showing of NoScript's as since I am using NoScript for free. I wouldn't mind if AdBlock meddled with NoScript to show AdBlock's, and only AdBlock's, own ads.
I think the GP's main point was that you say it's alright for noscript to force their ads upon you as you use their software for free but it's not fine for other content publishers to force their ads upon you. So what gives noscript the right to unblock their ads when, say, /. can't unblock ads as it doesn't have an invasive plugin but is also free to use and a good source of news and information? Personally I think that a site that is continually evolving and changing can demand more revenue then a plugin that can be written once and then simply maintained but that is another discussion.
If I was witty I'd put something funny here but, as it stands, I am not and have just wasted seconds of your life
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!
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
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.
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.
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?
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...
So what gives noscript the right to unblock their ads when, say, /. can't unblock ads as it doesn't have an invasive plugin but is also free to use and a good source of news and information?
What you said.
I'm referring to the program or programs which control how you view the content, and not the content itself. There are ways to support Slashdot, for example, and you can see that I'm a subscriber.
When VALinux release a browser or a plugin that I use then I won't mind it displaying only its own ads. Hell, I wouldn't mind being forced to see all of OSTG's ads if the browser/plugin is good enough.
Allowing one's own ads dosen't bother me but it is a slippery slope which may devolve into allowing ads from selected outsiders and going sharply downhill from there - and if I have to look at ads in that fashion then I will look for better plugins. If none exist then I will use Chrome instead of FireFox until myself or somebody else code a plugin which gives me control over what I see.
I got offered the choice of blocking slashdot ads today due to my contributions to the site. I had to think long and hard about whether to accept since I knew I was denying a site I value a source of revenue.
I have decided yes at the moment but I will probably change my mind since I have realised that the adverts never really bothered me anyway. I was always very good at ignoring adverts anyway so they made no difference to me. We live in a capitalist work and advertising is a part of that.
I dont read
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
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?
Google set up this nice search engine, then put adverts on it, and allowed others to have adverts.
Now, for every search I do there are 3-4 relevant sites, 5-6 exact copies of those same sites on a different server adding adsense advertising, and 2-3 other sites with ridiculous amounts of advertising and half-assed content.
This advertising-supported revenue model is really cluttering up the net, and I blame google 100%. Every halfwit wants a webpage with advertising on it, creating piles of redundant sites. Tech support website - there's a million of them, and they have different "guru" users, and people as the same questions on every site. Too much information, most of it wrong.
I've given up searching for error messages... half the hits are someone asking the question and no replies. Multitasking while the pages load, I usually resolve it myself before I find something relevant and/or useful.
Don't get me started on porn - seen her, seen her, yeah this is a copy of that other site, yeah these are all copyrighted images with the logos removed.
Fuck you internet, and fuck you google.
Fuck the webmasters, it's their own fault for making ads so obtrusive in the 1st place. Webmasters can bitch all they want, but they'll never get any ad revenue from me - I shop online from sites that earn my business.
Take what ye can. Give nothing back!
They may have the right to show ads, as you say. But they have absolutely no right to demand that I view them.
As for Wired, well their site is a horrible, confusing mess even without their ads.
The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money. If they turn around and say "Unblock or stop accessing", then that's perfectly within their "rights". And it's perfectly within /your/ rights to stop using the site in protest.
This was true a year or two ago, but I've seen a marked decrease in the number of ad-spam sites in my google search results - practically none these days. Either my search skills are somehow better than average (unlikely); or you're working off of outdated data.
When VALinux release a browser or a plugin that I use then I won't mind it displaying only its own ads.
Imagine MS put in ad blocking in a release of IE but it allowed ads to be shown on MS sites or through their ad network.
You don't mind because of who they are, not because of what they are doing. If you don't understand why that's wrong, I don't know what to say.
Regardless, the proposal sucks.
A good portion of ad revenue comes from non-regular visitors. People who land on the site read a page, then find an interesting ad to click off on.
Regular visitors tend to become ad blind. Giving regular visitors the option to see ads isn't a big plus for webmasters.
Dual Opteron < $600
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...
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
According to the article, about 5% of Firefox users have adblock installed. That's a tiny percentage of Internet users and most of them wouldn't click on adverts anyway.
This puts the level of loss in the 'background noise' category. I don't think it's worth alienating adblock fans over a personal guilt trip.
No sig today...
Actually, that's horseshit.
They do have both the technical and legal ability to do so. You agree to their terms the moment you access the site. If you don't like the terms, you are free to browse elsewhere.
There's a gaming site here in Australia (PALGN) that at one stage detected if you were blocking ads and asked nicely for you not to (they linked to an article they'd written on running costs, etc for the site). It was quite reasonable, they didn't force anyone to view their ads, but they could, and it would be 100% legal.
Just like it's 100% legal to block certain countries, IP ranges, etc from your site, it's 100% legal to block people who are blocking ads. It's your site, you have the right to refuse entry.
Just because you "think" something is true doesn't mean it is. Maybe check your facts before posting.
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!)
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 certainly can try, but ultimately there is no way a webmaster can "detect" if his advert was displayed properly, short of looking over the end-user's shoulder.
In the USA it's perfectly legal under copyright law for browsers to alter the display to remove ads. If webmaster wants to replace his homepage with a TOS contract, that's another story.
(Also it is hilarious that you "think" something is a "fact" based on one site who detected one ad-block method, and decided to be an asshat about it. Typical nerd spazoid reaction, I guess.)
Point being, most webmasters know adblocking is just a fact of life and they've learned to live with it. If Taco tried to stop adblockers from accessing Slashdot, most people would end up having a nice laugh at his expense.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
Nonsense. Responding to an request, they provided a text file containing rendering instructions compliant with standards (or not, but close to compliant). End of transaction. You don't violate any of their rights by not reading their reply in the way that they expect you to.
You don't HAVE to use a browser at all to view their site. You could use wget piped to less and 'render' it in your mind's eye. Alternatively, you could use a simple (or complicated!) algorithm to render the parts that you were most interested in and suppress those parts that you were not interested in. The fact that someone else will give the webmaster money every time someone downloads the instructions and subsequently renders the ad in no way changes the fact that you are free to use your computer to process information in a manner you see fit.
From a pragmatic standpoint, I agree with you that in order to support websites that ads should be viewed, but claiming that you're required to process information the way the sender wants you to simply doesn't seem to have support.
I suppose you could combine the ideas behind display ads and CAPTCHA -- "To navigate to the next page, please select what color the shirt in the HBO ad above is."
Shit, maybe I should patent that.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
If the ads come from their own website, I'm perfectly okay with that too. It means it's 99.99% less likely that the ad is running javascript that will exploit a vulnerability in the browser, install code, and turn my pc into a zombie.
When the advertisers realize that we have legit reasons to be worried about code running on our boxes, and they do their ads securely, and they play by our rules, then I'll be happier about seeing ads on the net. But right now, any ad appearing in your browser window only means that you're probably already compromised.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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.)
I don't recall the legal basis, but yes it went to trial. IIRC webmasters sued a spamware company that was replacing banner ads with their own, and lost.
I doubt something existing in temporary memory that isn't distributed is considered a 'derivative work', but I'll leave that up to the legal experts who aren't named Stallman.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
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.
How the fuck did this get an "interesting" mod?
Yes, of course it is. You can do WTF ever you want to copyrighted works, you just can't (necessarily) distribute the original work and/or its derivatives.
If I hated Coca Cola but loved a song that referenced it, I could clip that part out and only listen to my version--I just couldn't (under most licensing schemes) give the Coke-free version to anyone else. I could even write a program that cut that part out for other people, taking an MP3 or wav file or whatever as input, and distribute the program.
I hope the person who modded that insightful gets bitchslapped by a meta-mod.
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.
Here's the question though: might it also be within your "rights" to selectively download parts of the site, as long as their server is happy to serve those parts? Even if one of those parts happens to be a block of text that says, "stop doing that"?
Frankly I think the word "right" doesn't fit, and though we all use it in this context, it can lead the conversation to confusing places. My view is that, if I send a GET request (provided that it isn't illegal to make the request), and the file gets served, I've done nothing wrong nor failed in any responsibility to the site owner.
This is not to say that I don't support sites and projects that I think are worthwhile, or remove sites from Adblock when asked. But it's my call. Hypothetically, were someone to demand patronage of me, my only option wouldn't be to stop visiting the site, I'd also have the option to just ignore the demands. As long as the server is also configured to ignore them, my relationship to the site owner has not changed.
Most of the useful content on slashdot.org is comments. Many of them were written by me. It says on the bottom of the home page, "Comments are owned by the Poster". If I were to send SourceForge a bill for all the content I've provided to this site, would they be on the hook for paying it? Would their only option be to respond to it by blocking my account?
I think that they'd probably ignore it, since we don't have the kind of relationship that prevents them from doing so.
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.'"
Because I know the sites need revenue to survive and I don't want to subscribe to 850,000 web sites (okay, it'd be just a handful really) I refused to run anything like adblock. I'd block popups and let other ads display.
However modern ads are even more obnoxious than pop-up and pop-under ads: they pop out and float over the content, they start playing annoying videos and audio without my prompting it, and they stay in the way over the content even after they're through playing. I stuck it out about a week and then finally installed adblock.
Now, the sites and advertisers lose out. Eventually when everyone gets fed up and turns to ad blockers, everybody will lose because the sites will either go subscription-only or shut down completely. Advertisers have gone too far and are alienating people who were willing to not block them to keep revenue flowing, but do they really think I'm going to buy their crap if they negatively impact my computing experience? Hell no! I'll just block their ads, and won't even be aware of what they're selling. If I happen to buy from a competitor because I got so annoyed that I didn't see their advert, well, tough shit. They brought it on themselves.
Everybody loses!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
I'm entirely with the OP on this.
I'll add that I would be more compelled by Internet ads if 99.99999% of them weren't worthless, annoying crap. It's the same problem I have with many television ads: Does anyone truly believe they will gain my business by attempting to insult my intelligence?
Things that blink and wiggle around when I'm trying to read. Some goddamn dancing peacock built in flash with a feather for every state urging me to take out a mortgage. Flash ads that talk! Stuff that tries really hard to look like Windows error boxes! Shit that pops up as an overlay on top of the page I'm trying to read, and obfuscates the way to make it go away! Some goddamned double underlined thing that pops up a big gaudy box that's nearly impossible to close because I had the audacity to move my mouse over the wrong word in a pararaph! Some thing that stalls a page loading for a minute and a half because it's got a thirty megabyte FLV embedded in it!
It's not bad enough that nobody pushing banner ads seems to sell anything I want. Apparently every advertiser on the face of the planet has also taken it upon himself to personally irritate, insult, annoy, obstruct, or attempt to cajole me through threats and lies ("Your system is insecure, click here to install our tool!" "492 malware threats found!" "Hide your porn history from prying eyes!"). Modern banner ads are the new spam, and it's only fitting that they be universally blocked until advertisers can find a way to be more compelling and a lot less obstructive.
Other than the odd impulse purchase from J-List or ThinkGeek or something, who seriously buys anything they see in a banner ad? Almost nobody, that's who. Search engines are the backbone of everyone's browsing experience nowadays, so if you're selling something on the web and somebody wants to buy it they're assured to find you long before you find them via stupid banner ads. And, you know, potentially turn them to one of your competitors instead because you insist on making your ads fucking annoying.
Yeah, please update your Google.
Have you considered a hosts file edit? Servers that dish out the most annoying stuff simply get added to a hosts file and null routed.
Even if the web host begged permission to display advertisements, the worst offenders that float over the article preventing viewing is simply fail to load. Non-obnoxious banners and stuff from more civil advertisers are not blocked, just the annoying ones.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
The hell they don't. You're visiting their web site hosted on their hardware, at their expense, and maintained with their time/money.
Which they've put online in the Internet, which was developed with my tax money, is running on the telco lines put in the ground with my tax money, and which I'm accessing through my DSL line that I pay for.
I figure it equals out. If they don't want people visiting their site they don't have to put it online, you know?
There are laws in most civilized countries preventing commercial entities from certain filtering mechanisms with respect to their customers. For example, it would be illegal for any US store to put up a sign that says "no niggers allowed inside", or to enforce such a door policy, with or without the sign.
Commercial interests are a part of the bigger whole, which is society and culture. They should stop pretending that they are the big picture and everything else has to run according to their rules.
One of the rules of the Internet is: You are the server, you don't control the client. You decide what information you send, the client decides how to process it. If for some reason the client turns all your tags into tags before displaying them, that's how it is, like it or not. If he doesn't want to display pictures, or titles, or navigation bars, or advertisement, then that's how it is. You don't control the client. Like it or leave it.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
The original AdBlock extension had this feature. I don't know where it went in AdBlock Plus.
I'm not sure what you mean by roll-over ads, but if I'm correct, you're talking about the CSS display:block and possibly similar "animated" stuff, usually using a scripted timer to deactivate (and possibly to activate in the first place, thus rollover, tho I've never seen that since I seldom have scripting actually on, except on sites where it has been demonstrated not to give me problems or annoyances).
Such things, and really, any CSS element, can be disabled by simply rewriting any display option to display:none, or adding it to the element if not already there. I don't happen to run a browser based adblock of any sort as I was doing something similar using privoxy (on Linux, and the Proxomitron before that, on MSWormOS) before those sorts of browser-based features arrived, and they're more powerful and flexible anyway, but certainly, with the personal proxies, it's normally easy enough to setup a filter to do that rewrite dynamically, which is what I've done.
In fact, it was only a few days ago that I came across a site using display:block, and setup the generic display:none rewrite, because that site had the block set to apply for 15-20 seconds (the text said 15, the code said 20) using javascript, which, not being enabled, didn't unblock. Making things worse, while the site /had/ coded a click here to continue button, that was scripted as well, so it wasn't working either! Well, any site that's doing that sort of thing is a site not worth trusting with scripting in the first place in my book, so no, I was NOT going to turn it on for them. But a few minutes and one privoxy filter addition later, viola! No more display:block! That filterset is set to apply globally unless I've setup an exception, but I don't expect I'll be setting up many exceptions to display:block rewriting!
A couple days later, I noted I'd followed another RSS feed (courtesy of another site) link to the site, and sure enough, no more trouble! If I hadn't known about the filter I'd put in place a couple days earlier, I'd have been none-the-wiser that they were even doing it at all!
But as mentioned, the display:none trick can be used for any sort of CSS element, or at least I've used it on several now, before this, more site-specific, and never had a problem. It's great to be able to disable whole elements, poof, without screwing up the formatting, and unlike trying to filter certain other undesired (non-CSS) elements (such as various table tags, where auto-parsing to find the appropriate /tag can be troublesome), the CSS namespace is specific enough and the attributes engineered well enough, one can usually do it without disabling anything actually desired on the page at the same time.
Duncan
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master,
and if you use the program, he is your master."
R Stallman
Even for people with fast connections and fast computers - I lost count of the times I've had to wait 30+ seconds for a page to load purely because of some overloaded ad server sometime back in 2002.
Note to site admins: if people routinely have to wait stupidly long times whilst browsing your site purely due to mandatory ad placement, they'll eventually stop coming. It was this sort of behaviour that led me to using ad blocking tools in the first place.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
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.
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.