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Adblock Plus To Offer 'Acceptable Ads' Option
Many readers have submitted news of a week-old announcement from Wladimir Palant, creator of Adblock Plus, about a change to the addon that will allow unobtrusive ads to be displayed. The change has been controversial because most people who run the addon strongly dislike seeing any ads. Palant hastens to point out that this is a toggle-able option, and by changing one setting, users can resume ad-less website viewing. Many are upset, however, that the setting defaults to allowing the display of "acceptable" advertisements. The description of "acceptable" ads includes the following criteria: "Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar); Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images; At most one script that will delay page load (in particular, only a single DNS request)."
There's already an obvious way to permit no-annoying ads while blocking annoying ones, which is to have the subscription blacklist you already use for AdBlock delete the entries for the annoying ads. No need to build a special whitelist capability, unless you want to prevent people from using alternative blacklists.
I'm not actually too bothered by having a few ads, as long as
Unfortunately, that kills off most of the advertising services that might be used to support web sites I like (especially the no-tracking features, because the ad services use those to prevent web sites from faking view data.)
The current advertising-like annoyance I still get is Disqus's takeover of the site-comments business. It thinks that I'm blocking its cookies (I'm not), so some combination of Linux, Firefox, NoScript, Ghostery, AdBlockPlus, FF's Don't track is breaking it. (Also, it has lots of other problems, like not being good at keeping track of multiple identities - my comment histories on BoingBoing and various newspapers aren't supposed to all get lost, which happens if they get mushed together into one Disqus ID.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Shady people, shady deals.
... or it could simply be an acknowledgement that -- like it or not -- the web runs on advertising and allowing a bit of it in might not hurt you if you wanted to be more ethical. Ever thought about how small non-profit websites can afford to keep their domain names? In any case, the Adblock Plus devs have long been clear that one of their aims was to change advertisers' behaviour. This is clearly a move to drive change to a point where advertising is present but less intrusive (and also more ethical, i.e. not using psuedo-OS dialogue boxes to fool the gullible).
Anyway, as long as the option to turn all advertising off is present (and it clearly is) then I can't see how this hurts you or anyone else. But hey, if you don't like it, don't use AdBlock Plus.
Junk mail is marvelous. It pays for my local post office to exist and have enough people to serve us. It is energy in the form of paper which can be burned. By carefully soliciting the right sources I can get enough paper that can be safely burned to provide around 60 percent of my heating needs. I'd heat water with it but have yet to find an effective and efficient means to do so with wood or paper.
The other benefit is costing advertisers money. Money to pay my friendly postman and money to heat my home. It's a win for me.
Spammers, I'd burn those too if I could catch them thermally depolymerize them and put the biodiesel in my truck.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty