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.

Comments

Dup!

[thsths]

I have a deja vu feeling, and it is not an ad.

Re:Dup!

[gazbo]

Now,now. You can hardly expect Timothy to read back nearly a whole day's worth of stories just to do his job to a basic level of competence. That could take upwards of seconds - and he'd have to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Slashdot to allow duplicates

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe we need a Dupeblock Plus?

Re:Slashdot to allow duplicates

[dakara]

And then at some point down the line it will allow unobtrusive dupes through

Doublespeak

[betterunixthanunix]

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.

Re:Doublespeak

[mounthood]

I'm going to *start* using Adblock Plus because of this. Advertisers need to be told where the line is, and this is the first practical way to communicate that too them. They should have even more checkbox options so users can decide what's acceptable rather than the devs. People don't use Adblock Plus often because they don't want to deny funding to websites, but a reasonable and practical compromise could kill intrusive advertising and tracking, just like popup blockers (mostly) killed popup adds.

As to Doublespeak, it's called Adblock *Plus* - it blocks adds plus tells advertisers what's what.

Re:They got paid for this...

[truthsearch]

I only block ads because the majority are intrusive and many sites are over saturated. If ads were all friendly I wouldn't block any of them. I think many (most?) people probably feel the same way.

This is a duplicate.

[Millennium]

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.

Re:This is a duplicate.

[broken_chaos]

There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content.

It's not 'stealing content' to determine what I do and do not wish to download or execute on my computer. I simply do not feel I can trust any advertisers to not be obtrusive, potential insecurity vectors, or abuse my privacy.

Re:This is a duplicate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blocking ads is not stealing content. You are awfully brainwashed.

Allow filtering by format details

[DoofusOfDeath]

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.

I unblock ads at webmaster's requests

[sandytaru]

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.

Privacy is key, but doesn't seem respected here

[ciaran_o_riordan]

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.

Re:They got paid for this...

[Tharsman]

I am a power user, and I actually don’t mind ads. I HATE pop-up ads, though. The ones that show in the middle of the screen while you are reading, the ones that do crazy stuff when you accidentally roll over them, and every single flash based ad. But plain image banner ads, PNGs or GIFs, I don’t mind. Heck sometimes I like them. In some sites they let me know of products I care for (like upcoming games.)

I currently manually manage ad block in Firefox to allow certain sites to show their ads because I know the sites in question don't allow obtrusive stuff.

That being said: they stated that they can’t automatically determine what is an obtrusive ad so they are instead going for a kind of partnership program where they won’t block ads from specific sources that agreed to their terms. That is garbage. If you ever dealt with an ad agency you should know they WILL push as hard as they can and they will slowly violate the agreement terms and annoy users like most already do.

Re:They got paid for this...

[jfengel]

I'm one. I use NoScript rather than AdBlock because it blocks the kind of ads that make it hard to read what I'm trying to read. I don't mind the ads on Slashdot. I've been offered the option of turning them off, and I don't take it. I like the site and don't mind if that's what it takes to preserve it.

"ads power the web". too bad...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

The straw that broke the camels back

[SmallFurryCreature]

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.

Re:Am I in the monority?

[Full Metal Jackass]

I think you just invented a word! "Monority" n: A minority of one.

The internet existed BEFORE ads

[tekrat]

Sure, it wasn't the internet YOU know and love, but in many ways, it was a better place. Now get off my lawn.

I want to publish my ad acceptance policy.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Instead of blocking all ads or deferring to the judgement of others, I would like to make my browser send an ad-acceptance policy.

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.