Slashdot Mirror
Adblock Plus Developers To Allow 'Acceptable' Ads
First time accepted submitter Roman Grazhdan writes "Developers of Adblock Plus, an award-winning add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome boasting over 12,000,000 users, announced that starting from version 2.0 the extension would come with a white list of unobtrusive, privacy-respected ads. These will be allowed by default; users will still be able to block them by unchecking 'Allow non-intrusive advertising.' The developers say: 'Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising.' What is this — betrayal of ideals of annoyance-free web or birth of independent authority for standards for advertisement?" Ads are sometimes annoying, but they also make certain websites (like this one!) possible. Getting the balance right is tricky — I know I often avoid sites because of interstitial advertising, pop-ups, etc. Whitelisting sounds like a good way to reward sites that try to keep it subtle; offloading and generalizing the task of categorizing ads into annoying or acceptable gives sites and advertisers a good threshold to duck beneath. Next step I'd like to see: a sliding scale, so browsers can be set to zero, or eleven, for tolerable annoyance. Update: 12/13 14:54 GMT by T : My fault: I liked the story so much that I missed it the first time.
I have a deja vu feeling, and it is not an ad.
maybe we need a Dupeblock Plus?
I can't really state anything but like my subject says, I believe they got paid off by someone to do this. I fear that their hard work probably wasn't seen as a cash flow of significance. I don't buy the only "25% against any advertising" mantra. I think a lot of people, myself included, will be looking for another advertisement blocking plugin. I pay for Slashdot, not much, but I do pay. I pay for what I read.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
The ministry of adblocking, which displays advertisements.
In all seriousness though, who thought this was a good idea? We use adblock to block advertisements. I do not want the developers deciding for me which advertisements will not be blocks; the only person who should control the whitelist is me.
Palm trees and 8
As I said before, though, I'm OK with this. I don't use ABP to stick it to The Man; I use it because a number of my ads either actually make my browser unusable or are annoying enough to seriously detract from my browsing experience. If ABP can block only these while letting more benign ads through, then I applaud them: it allows site owners who don't employ these ads to keep their revenue, and it provides a clear alternative for site owners who currently do employ these ads. That's the sort of thing that actually stands a chance of making some change.
In fact, I wish this weren't optional. There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content. The people who run this just to stick it to The Man are not allies in that fight.
I'd like separate options for suppressing:
- Pop-unders
- Pop-overs
- Ads emitting sound without being clicked on
- Ads that start playing video without being clicked on
- Ads that are sneaky (single-pixel, etc.)
- etc.
Usually webcomic artists, who come right out and state that their ad revenue is their primary source of income generation. I'll even click through ads on those web sites. But in exchange, I expect those webmasters to patrol their own ads, and if anything is offensive or obnoxious, have it removed at the source. Web ads, even automated ones, should not be a totally passive thing on the part of the webmasters. If they're asking people to click their ads, then they need to make some effort to supervise the ad process.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
I'm not 100% anti-advertising, but the privacy issue is deeper than just being on a "Do not track" list.
If the ad is served from a host controlled by the advertiser, then they have my IP address, the date and time, the number of times I saw the ad, and (by the "referer" header) what page(s) I was viewing when I saw the ad.
For me, "acceptable" ads are those served by servers which I've opted into correspond with, either by typing into the address bar or by clicking a link.
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On TV, you see product placement in TV shows all the time, because of DVRs. Some shows are rampant with them, like Big Bang Theory, which must get a pile of money from Dell. Laptops are ALWAYS carried around with the Dell or Alienware showing.
Or you get websites like Slashdot, which show advertiser bias in the bizarre choices of stories, clearly designed to get click rates up, or the new "sponsored" stories.
I'd rather see unbiased media and unobtrusive ads, then see ads blocked and the whole internet get as bad as /. in that regard.
I've seen people express that opinion and it's nonsense. Remember the internet before the first banner ad, before the web even? It was as *awesome* resource in the 1980's. It hadn't been corrupted by money and commercial interests. There was no astroturfing, you could believe reviews were a real person's opinion about 100% of the time. There were excellent resources to answer questions about a huge range of things without the $$$ sites offering to sell you shit you didn't need infesting everything. Your every move was not tracked and used to sell you shit.
So if we kill internet ads entirely, and all this crap disappears from the net? That's no loss. That's a gain. Let it all die, I say. Yes, this site too, if that's what it means: usenet of yore before the commercial spammers ruined that too had FAR better tech discussions than slashdot. Maybe the net can go back to what it was before TBL invented the web to make it usable by idiots, attracting legions of idiots, marketeers, censors, and mouth-breathing people clicking on ads to infest it.
I didn't bother for a long time, partially because I use a lot of different browsers for different needs and that meant that I needed to setup and ad-filtering proxy which is a tiny amount of work and I am very very lazy.
But ads got so annoying over time that I just installed it, made it the default on my home network (all HTTP traffic is filtered) and not just am I not annoyed anymore by ads, the speed has gone up.
Ads take just to much time. It doesn't matter where they are. Trying to read an American magazine is a game of "hunt the article". It used to be article - ad - article. Now the article between several ad pages, often only part of the page and spread all over the magazine to force you to keep hunting for it and be exposed to more ads. TV? 5 minutes of ads for every 10 minutes of TV? Including ads for the program you just interrupted?
That leads me to the next thing about ads. They are so goddamn fucking stupid. A tiny handful are funny but they are shown maybe a handful of times. The ads that are in every single commercial block are the ones that make your brain want to crawl out of your ears. I don't watch TV anymore, not because I am not in the mood for mindless drivel but because even my desire for mindless drivel is insulted when the ads come on.
Ad-block can start to let ads through but lets face it, they do this for money and so, the ad that pays the most is the one that gets through. That is how all this kinda stuff works. Movie TV channels advertise with not showing ads, and then charge a premium for special offer blocks. You buy a DVD not to see ads and then they put non-skippable ads in front of the content.
It is not like there are no alternatives to ad-block.
If advertisers want to get back on my browser they need to sanitize their own industry. Get rid of all the animated ads, the ads that are slow or stupid or annoying and make them be delivered at insanely high speeds so that NEVER EVER a webpage refuses to load because of a slow ad server.
But that won't never happen and so, I got several block lists. Opera has the most userfriendly at the moment, can even be used to content on the site itself.
I have even gone to the trouble of filtering out comments on sites with drivel comments. It is easy, just write a javascript command to hide blocks with author "smallfurrycreature" and the net will be a cleaner place.
Yes, this is drivel, but at least it isn't drivel tracking your every move or taking ages to load.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I think you just invented a word! "Monority" n: A minority of one.
The only way that I'll accept ads is if they're hosted by the site that I'm visiting.
Sure pop-up, pop-under, flash, and all of the other obnoxious forms of advertising that advertisers have come up with are annoying. Yet I am willing to put up with the inconvenience if there was some guarantee of privacy. And advertising (as it stands today) is one of the multitude of ways that users can be tracked across the multitude of sites that they visit.
So blocking it shall be.
Sure, it wasn't the internet YOU know and love, but in many ways, it was a better place. Now get off my lawn.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Excuuuuse me if I'm "so last millenium", but what are ads? I browse the web with `links`in gorgeous 149col x 143rows of text!
We need a search engine for websites that do not use ads. One which doesn't crawl blogs. A few other things.
Yeah. I think I'll create one. Going to make its operational expenses very simple -> it'll use BitCoins to pay for the monthly traffic. So long as the balance remains positive, the site stays up.
I favor this approach, as Google / Bing / Yahoo are already unusable to me. If I am doing CS work, searching for information on an algorithm, I don't want 300 sites trying to sell me a book on that very algorithm. I already own the book, and the information I want is not in it.
I am John Hurt.
I would like say, "no sound", "no video/animated gifs", "no flash", etc etc.
Also I would like to specify what I am currently in the market for, "digital SLR", "Carib Cruise" etc
Also I would like to say what I would not click at "singles" "sexual stuff", "gambling" etc
I would like some site like Mozilla to offer me list of these choices in some web site. I go there and I check mark on or off of these items. That site hashes all these choices into a simple hash and gives it to me. I send that hash to all sites I visit. That site can use the hash fetch my ad acceptance policy and displays ads accordingly.
I would like the site that hashing my preferences into hash to make it available for others. So when I first visit the site, I get a choice of most popular policies number of people using that set of options. I clone one of the popular ones, make a few adjustments and get a new hash for myself.
Eventually the web sites would know what kind of ads would be accepted by majority of the users and what would not be. With this feedback we can give good guys some decent break. That is the only way to make the annoying irritants go away.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact