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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.
And just install "NagBlock Plus".
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.
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?
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
Okay, but here's the thing: No one has the right to make money using a bad business model. We're seeing that with newspapers, so why should other Web sites be immune?
I don't know about you, but I pay for my Internet access, and I rather like the idea of controlling what gets downloaded onto my computer and what doesn't.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
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.
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 +++
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.