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Website Mass-Bans Users Who Mention AdBlock
An anonymous reader writes to recommend TechDirt's take on the dustup over at the Escapist, which recently tried on banning users from their forums for the mere mention of AdBlock. In the thread in which the trouble started, a user complained that an ad for Time Warner Cable was slowing down his computer. Users who responded to the poster by suggesting "get Firefox and AdBlock" found themselves banned from the forums. The banned parties didn't even need to admit they used AdBlock, they simply had to recommend it as a solution to a troublesome ad. The forum's recently amended posting guidelines do indeed confirm that the folks at the Escapist believe that giving browsing preference advice is a "non forgivable" offense. After a lot of user protest, the forum unbanned the transgressors but heaped on the guilt.
Given that they have reversed the bans since then, it's not that simple, now is it? What is the value of a site without visitors?
When Microsoft decided that they wanted to limit the number of features in the OS based on how much I was willing to pay them, I changed operating systems.
When the Sea Shepherds decided that terrorism was a valid way of combating whaling, I stopped contributing to them.
When Hamas decided that war with Israel would broaden their support, I decided to throw my support elsewhere.
When Obama decided that the only way out of this depression was massive spending programs, I affiliated myself with a different party.
If a site is not going to treat you with respect and dignity, then take your business elsewhere. A site that measures you in "eyeballs" rather than "contributors" is not something you should be associated with in any way.
Fine, I will. Luckily there are sites like Slashdot which do fine without ads.
Hey, where the hell did my previous reply about Digg go?!!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Lets ban people for suggesting channel switching for the duration of ad breaks on tv aswell...
A site I frequent ran some ads for a while that gave me grief. When it spawned a discussion thread they got rather pissy about it.
but, here's a point...
If your Ads fuck-up the user experience that bad then they can't read your site you dimwits. If they can't read it they will go away and not come back. Would you rather have that? -FIX- the Ads promptly and there won't be a problem.
It's not a threat to say "If you don't fix it, I will leave". It's a fact, and it's not entirely by choice.
All internet users should use some Flash blocker that allows the user to accept specific flash content, period.
FireFox and Chrome have plugins called FlashBlock, Safari's is called ClickToFlash. IE8 provides this functionality from the Flash player add-on in Manage Add-ons under Tools, just select More informations and click Remove all sites. All these will let you reenable either individual Flash applets or whole sites when you browse those pages.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Do what Arstechnica discovered after they tried blocking adblock users from seeing articles; actually *ask* your users to whitelist your site in adblock (or other ad blockers) with a promise that if the adverts on the site cause issues with users machines that they will work to resolve them and/or remove those adverts from rotation.
So far, every site that I use regularly and trust (for appropriate values of trust) that have asked me to whitelist them have had their request granted. I'm happy to help out the sites with their revenue on the condition that the adverts on said site do not impact my browsing experience; pop-ups, pop-unders, sound, fullscreens, "intellitext" or mid-paragraph ads are an instant nono, as are any that impact page loading due to shoddy design and overloaded ad servers, but I'm willing to put up with most other ads if I'm asked to in order to support the site.
I pay for my bandwidth I'll choose what I download, including page elements.
The Internet was so much better before corporations/bussiness was significantly interested. Befor anyone says the ads pay for content there was plenty of content in the early days of the internet, much of it was high quality because the people who placed it there wanted to, were interested or passionate . Not because they were getting paid.
I turned off my TV in 1996, internet entropy has caught up with television. It is becoming prepackaged "safe for idiots" and less free
After the community manager unbanned everyone, the follow-up posts in that thread are all fan-boyish groveling which I totally don't understand. "We shouldn't use adblockers anyway!! Thanks for unbanning! Much respect!!" Respect for what? Taking the boot off your throat? Here's some bannable "browsing preference advice:" don't read The Escapist.
The first rule of ad blocking is you DON'T talk about ad blocking!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Not too long ago, around a year ago, Blizzard added banner ads to the official World of Warcarft game forums.
People strongly objected on the basis that nobody can post to those forums unless they already pay Blizzard money for an account, so why should paying customers be subjected to the advertisements? They clearly didn't need advertising revenue to pay the bills, it was just a crass money-grab. This spawned many posts on how to block the ads. The result? All of the ad-blocking discussion threads deleted, and all of their creators banned from the forums. Some people complained, but they soon found out that talking about deleted threads is also grounds for a ban.
It sucks, but what can you do? The only way they would have any incentive to change is if people actually quit the game in protest over the decision, which isn't particularly likely. They perhaps spent some of their good will by way of their actions, but there's no real immediate or obvious negative repercussions.
I am torn as well. I understand the need for advertisements to subsidize content on the web, but I also see it as an issue when a company abuses the ubiquity of ads to slip them in as a money-grab when they clearly aren't dependent on advertising for their revenue. Moreover, I really feel like it should be obvious at this point that banner ads are stupid. They fact that people go to such lengths to remove them should indicate how people feel about them. They're really no different then spam; except spam is free, so it can be profitable with abysmal response rates. Does anyone actually buy anything as result of banner ads? Sure people click them all the time, but how often is it done on purpose? The damn things are just in the way. I'm constantly accidentally tapping on ads on my iPhone, but I sure as hell have never bought anything as a result.
Annoying flash ads, banner ads, and javascript-fueled nightmare ads are not selling anything. Anyone notice those are all things Google does not use? I think they know a thing or two about the business of internet ads. They've got 25 billion dollars in the bank that says internet advertising works better when its not obtrusive and obnoxious.
What is the value of a site without visitors?
The site owners banned these people because they don't see any value in a site without revenue.
I pay for my pipe. I own my computers, and have root/admin rights and responsibilities for them. It is my duty to myself and others on the Internet to lock down security threats I know about. As an IT person, if I do not take steps to stop an avenue of infection, then I'm committing gross negligence at my job.
Some ad-rotators from third parties are one of the top sources of browser exploits. A lot of unscrupulous ad services place control of the ad to anyone who comes with dollars. This means they can go for a browser add-on exploit, or many other things. And since the ad is random, neither the ad company, nor the malware company making ads gets blamed. Everyone wins except for the website, and the user.
Even first tier ad companies have gotten bitten by this in the past: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/13/doubleclick_distributes_malware/
So until I can get some assurance from ad companies that they are not allowing people to serve up malware, I will take steps to protect security, and that means Adblock, NoScript, and on company networks, I'm going to be using Privoxy or some commercial ad-busting transparent proxy to make sure that this avenue of intrusion is closed.
And if some website bans people for wanting to protect their own security, fuck them. It is as simple as that. Most users if banned will just create another user from a different IP. If the new user creation process gets too stiff, that web forum will just fade into irrelevance, unless it caters to just a small, inbred crowd.
Apparently (FTA), this is in the site's T&Cs
Do not confess, teach, admit to, or promote ad-blocking software that will allow users to block the ads of this site.
Great. Using ad/flash-blocking software is a crime now? Whatever happened to reasonable discussion?
Instead of just banning the users, could the mods not have simply pointed out that the site needed the ad revenue to survive, and also acted to remove the offensive ads?
Who are the customers of a site such as this; the users, or the advertisers?
That, or The Escapist could've simply looked into the matter, discover the banner causing problems and remove it from their rotation (or contact the banner vendor they get it from) and everybody would say "the Escapist are awesome for actually listening to their visitors".
Quite a contrast there, eh?
There is a good reason a home is called a home. As opposed to a marketplace. People like to actually live at home, not at the marketplace (shopaholics excluded.)
Internet used to be more of a home. Now it is become more of a marketplace. Everywhere you turn, there is some shmuck pitching and pushing his stuff onto you, and when you refuse he goes verbal.
The whole thing is rooted in overpopulation again. Too many people need to survive, and they colonize the Internet space, with their smallminded schemes.
When Obama decided that the only way out of this depression was massive spending programs, I affiliated myself with a different party.
I hope it wasn't the Republicans, since the bailout that was required to prevent a depression directly resulting from years of irresponsible lack of oversight was initiated by George W. Bush and merely completed by Obama.
I also hope it wasn't the Libertarians, since it was their lassaiz-faire philosophy of deregulation and strict adherence to the Chicago School of Economics which infected and drove the Republican deregulation push of the last 20 years that in turn was directly responsible for the unregulated behavior that resulted in the current crash, and would have sent us directly into a second Great Depression had Bush/Obama/Brown not acted as they did.
I'm not sure what that leaves ... the Greens? Aryan Nationalists? Socialists? Teabaggers? Communists? The Party of Everything-is-Black-and-White-No-Exceptions-Allowed-and-Anything-That-Doesn't-Fit-My-World-View-Perfectly-Must-Be-a Liberal/Conservative-Conspiracy?
One issue only voting rarely works out--there will be some other issue in your new affiliation that drives you away, like a lone sheep being herded back and forth across the paddock by a playful terrier.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I might be quite backward in my thinking here but... I pay my isp for a subscription to access the internets (every last one of them). The specific contect I choose to receive or block at my end is my own damn business. It's like being banned from walking down the street because I chose not to look at the billboards!
slashdot have allowed me to turn off adverts, but I haven't. I have adblock installed, but I am not subscribed to any block lists, I generally only block adverts and advertisers which are particularly instrusive (for example, trustedreviews' website has broken adverts which obscure text, and theregister have adverts in the middle of the articles). I occasionally find adverts useful so I would miss them, but I am merely very selective, and I would rather put up with a bit of screen clutter to buy content instead of paying cold hard cash!!
AdBlock is of course not ideal from a website's owners point of view.
A proper admin would have solved the problem, not made a new one.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Sadly slashdot is not immune of this either. It's gotten a bit better these days, but in the old days there was this one editor, JonKatz, who was treated just like a god here. Whenever he wrote some article, it was like everybody worshipped his words, you know what I mean? Serious groupthink! It was a bit creepy, actually.
I thought you need to enable Javascript to get them in the first place.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
Zero Punctuation did a piece on this recently. Here's transcript:
Ananonymousreaderwritestorecommend TechDirt'stakeonthedustupoverattheEscapist, whichrecentlytriedonbanningusersfromtheirforums forthemerementionofAdBlock. Inthethreadinwhichthetroublestarted, ausercomplainedthat anadforTimeWarnerCablewasslowingdownhiscomputer. Userswhorespondedtothe posterbysuggesting"getFirefoxandAdBlock"foundthemselvesbannedfromtheforums. Thebannedparties didn'tevenneedtoadmittheyusedAdBlock,theysimplyhadtorecommenditasasolutiontoatroublesomead. Theforum'srecentlyamended postingguidelinesdoindeed confirmthatthefolksat theEscapistbelievethatgiving browsingpreferenceadviceisa"nonforgivable"offense. Afteralotofuserprotest, theforumunbannedthe transgressorsbutheapedontheguilt. AND THEN THEY ALL HAD LEMON MERANGE PIES.
@"The Internet was so much better before corporations/business was significantly interested."
Plus now they are interested, they show through their own actions, they have no moral limit to how far they will go. This action by them is blatantly effectively punishing Thought Crimes. I guess talking about AdBlock is against what the business wants, which is effectively compliant consumers who don't learn how to block advert bombardment.
I guess they have never heard of the Barbra Streisand effect.
But it does makes me wonder what kind of world we are heading into where corporations gain ever greater control of the major web sites when they show they are so willing to behave like this.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
I run a site for owners of a certain model of RV (of which only about 1000 were made, so the market for my site really isn't that large). Fortunately for me and my users, I can afford to run it out of my own pocket, without any ads. In fact, other than the domain name, it didn't cost me any additional money over what I was already paying for web hosting anyway. But, it's slowly growing to the point where it will cost me extra. I can absorb some of that, but at some point I'm going to have to ask for donations or put some ads on it... I'm certain most of my users will understand, but I've seen other sites where the users just don't get it - "This has been free in the past so it should continue to be free!" And that's on sites where people spend thousands of dollars modifying their cars, but are insulted when the site owner asks for $12/yearly toward maintaining the site where they got the info on how to modify their cars...
It only takes one bad ad to trigger the use of adblocking technology and then the users won't stop use it.
This is yet another case of ad companies creating problems for users that decreases the usability of a site.
On the other hand - I couldn't see much value over at the Escapist site anyway, at least nothing that did attract me.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
After many years[1] there finally seems to be some signs of progress being made on features that will help websites make things safer for their users:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/01/HTML-5-Sandbox-IFrame
http://people.mozilla.org/~bsterne/content-security-policy/
[1] I actually tried to get people to do something about a similar problem 8 years ago:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2002May/0021.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/mozilla-security@mozilla.org/msg01448.html
For years the browser and W3 have been focusing on adding "gas pedals", and their idea of brakes was "just make sure none of the hundreds of gas pedals we created are pressed", which is a bit trickier in the real world.
If they had added working "brake pedals" back then, stuff like the MySpace worm might not have happened. And ads and other 3rd party content might be more easily secured.
This is the same website that bans you if they think you've commented too quickly on a video. If they didn't have ZP, I'd never go there.
Plus now they are interested, they show through their own actions, they have no moral limit to how far they will go. This action by them is blatantly effectively punishing Thought Crimes. I guess talking about AdBlock is against what the business wants, which is effectively compliant consumers who don't learn how to block advert bombardment.
Talk of Adblock is a signal that the user is empowering themselves. If you want to make money with computers, the last thing you want is the user to become empowered, you need them reliant on you, the man in the middle providing a service.
Long term successful products on computers do not empower users, they make users dependent. Now, for an example, this'll go 2 ways: Windows (insightful please), MacOS (flamebait from the fanboys). But the point is valid. You don't learn about computers using those platforms, you learn about those platforms. We've all seen Windows users who brain shuts down in front of OSX, or Mac users who bitch about any other platform - it is because they are familiar with their platform, but not the ideas behind what they are doing.
Facecrook, Google et al. use the same idea: be the middle man, make the user come to you as the first thing when they need to contact someone, or want some information, etc..
Car analogies break down.
I've started using ad blocker, and I haven't turned back. I always thought that firefox bloat was the reason for website rendering to slow down. But after installing ad block and no script, I realized it's the content that's getting bloated.
The Original Complaint was about a particular ad slowing down the whole site.
No, the original complaint was about a particular ad slowing down the user's browser, including any other sites they might have had open. In fact, at least one user found it crashed their browser repeatedly, which is a non-forgivable offense in the modern era of tabbed browsing.
I am a strong supporter of adblocking software on Firefox or anything else. I do not consent to the level of advertising that seems to be acceptable to most people. I believe that spending 10% of your life being assaulted by advertising is not a good way to live. Further I believe that some advertising is directly causing harm to people by constantly playing on their fears and promoting irrational greed. The balance is wrong and we should have the means to tip it back to a sane level.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I haven't found a huge pushback against relatively unobtrusive ads that are reasonably tasteful, especially if the site owner explains why they were introduced, and the site has a community that actually knows and believes the site owner. A lot of the backlash is over the total opposite extreme of no ads: ads plastered on the page in 10-15 locations and even breaking the flow of articles, some animated in Flash (which also grabs your mouse pointer and breaks kb navigation), some of which play sounds at you, and some displaying gross teeth and spiders and fat bellies and god knows what else.
If you have a community that cares about the site, you might try gently introducing some optional payment options also. Even trivial things like: support the site with a $10 donation and you get a little icon next to your name in the forums as recognition.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Today I used a computer without adblock for the first time in months
I stopped at stared at the ads without realising they were ads.
They were so alien to me I couldn't comprehend why there was a picture of a fat woman on the screen which was ttoally irrelevant to what I was reading
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
What is the value of a site without visitors?
The site owners banned these people because they don't see any value in a site without revenue.
And they un-banned them because they realized, belatedly, that without visitors there will be zero revenue. Why is that so hard to grasp? When users feel compelled to take extra steps (AdBlock), just to wade through the crap to get to what they value (content) you're doing it wrong.
Yes it seems the did reverse the bans. However they added to the TOS something along the lines of; "Thou shalt not speak of ad-blocking software on this site". Its a good thing the site mods got religion. Now they can start Holy Crusades for other types of banned speech. That should fit in well with their policy of; give us some money and we will reduce the number of ads you see. How nice, think I'll stick with Adblock.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
There is one line in the post that intrigued me:
I ad-block sites that I've never been to before. If they look like a cool site or something that I'd use in the future, I turn off the ad-blocker on that site for any future visits. It's my way of saying "hmm, good job" to the site.
I realized then that most websites offer opt-out advertising. That is, you have to see it unless you pay, use an ad-blocking program, or contribute something that the owners deem worthy of removing adds (like that tempting "no ads for good karma" thing I keep seeing on /.).
I agree with what this community manager said and I would dare ask the logical follow-up question: why don't websites ask you to opt-in to their advertising? The idea would be simple - you visit the site and after X page views, or some other evil metric, you are taken to a page that says: hey, you can help us out with $$$, view ads, or just be a leech. I firmly believe that you will find that the majority of people who become engaged with the content will select either the $$$ or advertising paths. Right then and there your advertising space is worth more than all of the traditional "opt-out" websites.
So, do any advertising market providers allow for this?
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Some of the worst of this lot I've seen on The Pirate Bay, so maybe I should try AdBlock for that site. Normally I don't mind ads that behave themselves and don't try to "get in your face". But Flash ads have gone too far afield in this regard.
Let's face it. If you have something to advertise that I am interested in buying, a simple JPeg ad will get my attention. If I am not interested, the most flashy of Flash ads will have no hope in hell of changing my mind, and become annoying if they start tying up my computer resources trying to get my attention for their crappy products.
The owners of Escapist and other sites should recognize this basic fact and spend more time policing the ads and less time harassing their users, who can go elsewhere in a heartbeat. I thought this was obvious, but some never learn.
And when your browser chews up 400 megabytes or worse due to these bloaty ads, that's a problem. Users shouldn't have to throw out their old computers and buy the latest and the greatest just so they aren't slowed to a crawl -- or even crash -- because of silly bloaty ads. Go figure. So the STFU works both ways.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
TV is passive entertainment. Site forums aren't, so your comparison isn't exactly accurate.
Besides having rules on directing continuity people to keep viewers in place for the ads though, TV companies use localisation, CGI to alter advert content, higher sound volume during the adbreaks, adverts during the programmes themselves (not counting the product placement) and they crop the programmes' lengths to suit rigid advertisement times.
And none of that even mentions the lengths they'll go to censor writers, commission programmes for the braindead and shuffle their schedules around in direct competition with each other - just to pander to the advertisers.
Oh yeah, and in Ireland and the U.K. you're required by law to pay for a TV licence to watch that crap.
If they acted like that on your favourite website, would you still use it?
Escapist is not alone. EA bans anyone who talks about the Better Business Bureau and removes their posts. I recently, after 40 days (irony?) got a free copy of Mass Effect 2 Collector's Edition after turning them in to the BBB (something I've never done before) for their shitty Bad Company 2 launch and the fact that several weeks after launch, and after I had talked a friend in to buying the game for the whole 15 minutes I had been able to play it, it was still broken and took HOURS to connect to a server to the point where sane people walked away and wanted their money back.
I had purchased from STEAM so they told me I was fucked because they wouldn't talk to me since it had been a digital download (that they had to distribute to Valve, got their cut of the money for, and I paid full retail for; something else I rarely do). I appealed to the BBB, I guess because they didn't want the 3 year mark on their record they finally ponied up a game after refusing to refund anything, going through 3 tiers of tech support idiots and going full circle when they tried to "troubleshoot" my connection after already offering an alternate title.
I think people who are dicked on releases like this (in this case, the game was fine, it was their horrible MP authentication and Punk Buster server fiascos) should absolutely be compensated by the company at fault so they have a deterrent from pulling that shit again.
I should say, I haven't even opened the box for ME:2, I may well sell it, and I haven't touched BF:BC2 since either. Fuck EA, the Escapist, and all those like them. This will probably be marked OT but it seemed relevant enough, and happened recently enough (I just got the replacement game yesterday, after literally 40 days of going back and forth between EA and the BBB mediator every couple days) that I thought I'd share my story of woe.
If we are not allowed to talk about AdBlock plus, then lets talk about "document.write".
Most (probably all) ads are created with "document.write", so simply block "document.write". And enable "document.write" for the few sites that you really enjoy.
Add the following to "prefs.js" (seamonkey, firefox, ...):
user_pref("capability.policy.default.HTMLDocument.write", "noAccess");
... ");
user_pref("capability.policy.trusted.HTMLDocument.write", "sameOrigin");
user_pref("capability.policy.trusted.sites", "http://localhost http://forums.mozillazine.org/
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "trusted");
See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html for more details ...
Shh. If you listen carefully, you can hear me playing sad music on the world's smallest violin
I know that most of you weren't even born yet, but there was a time when the internet had no advertising. And it did just fine.
"Monetizing your assets" is marketing bullshit-speak for "fleecing stupid people and annoying the rest". In fact, I own several websites right now that contain no advertising and get traffic. Any business that performs a service that's worth more than a pile of post-horse-oats can afford enough hardware and bandwidth to support thousands of users for less than they spend on getting the mats by the front door cleaned. And anybody who wants a personal site can do the same for less than the cost of a "value meal" at McDonalds.
And as bizarre as this seems, I could even post original content and have user interaction just like The Escapist and still charge nothing.
Not only do I recommend ad-block to my friends, I install ad-blocking proxy servers for businesses, because nowhere in the world is wasted time, money and bandwidth more apparent than in businesses that actually measure expenses and productivity. Employee wants to spend a little while looking for a new recipe for hummus? Great! Employee gets distracted and spends a half our down the rabbit hole with punch-the-monkey ads, not so great.
They can advertise all they want, but nobody is going to tell me that I have to: