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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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."
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.
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.
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?
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 ...