Blocking Adblock Users without Javascript

[wsuffa]

I see a lot of references to whiners and crybabies because web surfers don't want to see obtrusive/intrusive ads. Does this also refer to web developers that want to foist those ads on us but can't get past ABP?

I get that some developers (as you say you are) don't do the pop-up/over/under/through crap, but a great many do. I can't tell before I go to a site whether it will be well behaved or not, hence I have installed and use ABP.

I'm always surprised when I use a public computer at how noisy most web sites are without ABP. I get that sites that don't actually sell products have to pay the bills somehow. And on sites that enable the "pay if you like it" links (like this one) I do pay if they provide me with useful content. But I'm not about to open the floodgates back up and uninstall ABP. Not unless/until the bulk of web developers decide to clean up their act.

Whining? Crying? Call it what you want - I call it evolution. Figure out a more courteous and respectful way of bringing in revenue and I'll wholeheartedly support it. Until then you can call me whatever you want because I won't be listening.

Stuff on the internet costs. Generating content took somebody's time. Building the pages takes time. Hosting the site takes storage, CPU and network bandwidth. I know everybody knows this at some level, but they seem to forget it when dealing with broadcast TV, radio, internet, etc.

So, you can have access to sites where people produce content and host as a hobby (which, if they get popular won't last long-bandwidth costs to much), you can have sites paid for by ads, or you can have pay sites.

Given the history, initially there wasn't that much web traffic. Then many of the players thought "Hey! This web stuff is just the ticket to let people look at our "magazine/newspaper/video/..." content. Then people stopped buying magazines/newspapers etc. So the providers took one of basically three approaches: paywall/subscription, voluntary contribution (wikipedia), ad revenue.

As with all technologies, some people began to abuse the system. (Anybody have an idea how much SPAM comes in to email? My work account, which is somewhat publicized in the industry and over 10 years old, gets >85% SPAM every day. And I have to pay for bandwidth and server side capabilities to deal with that volume. Which also costs money.) Intrusive ads are one of those abuses. As are sites that grab headlines and have fluff content. As are people who insist that their web content be free and they not be subject to any form of payment.

I try to be a good citizen and have no problem using sites like Rich's (I'm not sure I've ever visited one of your sites, but from what you've written I'm pretty sure you don't have moving target pop-over ads.) I'll even click on an ad from time to time if it interests me. But I have no use for sites with obnoxious ads. And I have no use for people who insist that the web be "free" to them. (And I'm not too keen on sites like Huffington Post where the content is generated for free while others make money off it.) "A worker is worthy of his hire."

Try to put yourself in the other person's shoes and see if you feel the same as you do now.

John

It's much less of an issue for me if I can tell ahead of time that the site is useful. Unfortunately, there are a great number of web hosts that either scrape other sites and deliver it as their own, outright pedal junk, or are just ad-bombs. The commercial side of the web doesn't police that at all. The web also (unlike newspaper and broadcast media) allows the web host to force the unsuspecting user to deal with obnoxious forms of advertising. Slow page loads, "capturing" users on a page (so they can't back up to the search when the page doesn't have results they're looking for), and similar things just make it a miserable place to be. At least the traditional media has editors (though that's been dumbed down to USA Today levels).

Rich COULD institute a paywall to ensure that he/his clients make money.

It's the wild-west out there, and Rich's script simply escalates the war. My prediction is that the Adblock folks find a way to disable it. Pot, kettle, same color.

 

[jsstevens]

It's much less of an issue for me if I can tell ahead of time that the site is useful. Unfortunately, there are a great number of web hosts that either scrape other sites and deliver it as their own, outright pedal junk, or are just ad-bombs. The commercial side of the web doesn't police that at all. The web also (unlike newspaper and broadcast media) allows the web host to force the unsuspecting user to deal with obnoxious forms of advertising. Slow page loads, "capturing" users on a page (so they can't back up to the search when the page doesn't have results they're looking for), and similar things just make it a miserable place to be. At least the traditional media has editors (though that's been dumbed down to USA Today levels).

Rich COULD institute a paywall to ensure that he/his clients make money.

It's the wild-west out there, and Rich's script simply escalates the war. My prediction is that the Adblock folks find a way to disable it. Pot, kettle, same color.

And all those things are obnoxious in my opinion. Junk, scrapings, disabling the back history, slow page loads, turning the entire page into a click, all of it! But refusing to allow any ads is as well. Unless you want the whole web to be paywall/user supported. (And crowd sourcing is another interesting twist on this. Things like MyFitnessPal where the users build-or at least enhance- the databases.)

Maybe we have to move to a blacklist subscription sort of model like we have with spam. It's not perfect (my email severs have gotten on the blacklist twice and it takes several hours to get them off.) but it's better than the wild west.

Rich is escalating. In response to escalation on the AdBlock side. Who will probably try to figure out how to circumvent what he's done. But my impression of AdBlock so far is they don't care so much if the content comes through as long as the ads don't.

John

 

[RJM62]

It's much less of an issue for me if I can tell ahead of time that the site is useful. Unfortunately, there are a great number of web hosts that either scrape other sites and deliver it as their own, outright pedal junk, or are just ad-bombs. The commercial side of the web doesn't police that at all. The web also (unlike newspaper and broadcast media) allows the web host to force the unsuspecting user to deal with obnoxious forms of advertising. Slow page loads, "capturing" users on a page (so they can't back up to the search when the page doesn't have results they're looking for), and similar things just make it a miserable place to be. At least the traditional media has editors (though that's been dumbed down to USA Today levels).

Rich COULD institute a paywall to ensure that he/his clients make money.

It's the wild-west out there, and Rich's script simply escalates the war. My prediction is that the Adblock folks find a way to disable it. Pot, kettle, same color.

The paywall idea is one that I ponder from time to time. It would be very easy to do. I wouldn't even need to touch the code itself on most of my sites. It could all be done with an alternate stylesheet if I wanted to do it that way. Some of the sites already have ad-free, printable stylesheets that I could easily adapt as paywall versions.

If I did it, I'd probably price the ad-free versions very, very inexpensively. As I've mentioned, I'm not dependent on the ad revenue. I'd be content for more people to simply "get" that what they believe to be "free" content really isn't "free." It has to be paid for some way. If people agreed to pay as little as $5.00 / year to kill the ads, I'd consider that a victory. So maybe it's something I should do.

The people who annoy me, however, are not the ones who'd agree to pay the $5.00. The ones who annoy me are the ones who populate the ABP forums. The ones who whine loudly about a single, static banner on a site, submit it to the forum, and get a snippet of custom code in return so they can block it.

Consider the two attached screenshots. One is of a Bitcoin site based in the Czech Republic. It has one ad -- a small, static banner for something called a Trezor, whatever that may be, that apparently has something to do with using Bitcoin. The ad doesn't flash, doesn't block the content, is relevant to the page, and cannot by any reasonable definition be considered "intrusive."

But it's an ad; and because it's an ad, it's unacceptable. Someone submitted the page to the forum pointing out the ad, and in return he received a piece of custom code so he could block it. It's one single, non-intrusive ad, but it was enough to bother the ABP user enough that he wanted it gone. He got his solution from the forum of a group that claims to support "acceptable ads." But what could be more acceptable than this innocuous, relevant, static banner in the left column?

As I said earlier, I was willing to work with Palant and ABP when the plugin was first introduced. I'm ashamed to say I even donated money to them when I thought what they were trying to do was tame some of the abuses in Web advertising. I supported that.

But it's since become clear to me that to these people, there's no such thing as an "acceptable ad." They want to see NO ads. Furthermore, they believe that they have the right to use and benefit from other people's content while spitting in their faces. That makes them parasites, as far as I'm concerned.

Rich

 

[RJM62]

And all those things are obnoxious in my opinion. Junk, scrapings, disabling the back history, slow page loads, turning the entire page into a click, all of it! But refusing to allow any ads is as well. Unless you want the whole web to be paywall/user supported. (And crowd sourcing is another interesting twist on this. Things like MyFitnessPal where the users build-or at least enhance- the databases.)

Maybe we have to move to a blacklist subscription sort of model like we have with spam. It's not perfect (my email severs have gotten on the blacklist twice and it takes several hours to get them off.) but it's better than the wild west.

Rich is escalating. In response to escalation on the AdBlock side. Who will probably try to figure out how to circumvent what he's done. But my impression of AdBlock so far is they don't care so much if the content comes through as long as the ads don't.

John

Thanks. That's my impression, as well. And they'll eventually circumvent my silly script, for sure. I do get some gratification, however, from knowing that because of my unusual approach, they'll probably spend a lot more time figuring out how to circumvent it than I spent writing it.

Rich

 

[jsstevens]

Thanks. That's my impression, as well. And they'll eventually circumvent my silly script, for sure. I do get some gratification, however, from knowing that because of my unusual approach, they'll probably spend a lot more time figuring out how to circumvent it than I spent writing it.

Rich

Rich,

Do you think a blacklisting service could work for these obnoxious ads? It would warn before visiting a site that has those kinds of ads (standards would need to be established). If it caught on, site with bad ads would see traffic drop and need to reform.

John

 

[wsuffa]

But refusing to allow any ads is as well. Unless you want the whole web to be paywall/user supported. (And crowd sourcing is another interesting twist on this.

Agree. And I made no suggestion that there be no ads at all (with the possible exception of sites I must pay substantial sums to use - in those cases, one ought to be able to pay to eliminate ads).

I have no objection to paying for content that's relevant and desirable. Much of the crap on the internet is neither, yet we are subject to horrid advertising techniques regardless.

I would argue that - just as in real life - there are extremists on either end. The argument is that some feel entitled to free content regardless - yet at the same time there are advertisers (or more specifically websites that use advertisers) that feel entitled to money regardless of the quality of content.

Don't look to Google to employ any filtering in their results to address advertising on websites (Yahoo either) because they are dependent on advertising for revenue, too. Classic conflict of interest.

My prediction is that *if this escalates too far* (without defining the term) that there will be those calling for government action - at which point both sides lose.

 

[RJM62]

Rich,

Do you think a blacklisting service could work for these obnoxious ads? It would warn before visiting a site that has those kinds of ads (standards would need to be established). If it caught on, site with bad ads would see traffic drop and need to reform.

John

A blacklist wouldn't be very practical considering the number of sites on the Web. A whitelist might be.

Actually, ABP offered (technically I think they still do) a whitelisting service for sites that agreed to comply with their "acceptable ads" criteria. The problems with that service are: (1) that the "acceptable ads" criteria have become absurd; (2) that ABP users have the ability to override the whitelisting functionality, and many of them do; and (3) that the most recent forks of ABP disable the whitelisting functionality by default.

The reason, again, is that the people setting the tone for how ABP works are the extremists who want to see no ads at all. The EasyList basically blocks anything that even resembles an ad and relies on the whitelisting (on the odd chance the user has it enabled) to allow the "good" sites through. So by default, an ABP user will see almost no ads unless the site designer was savvy enough to pore over all the filter lists and tweak his code enough to get it past the filters.

Even then, many ads will be blocked because they draw images from, link to, and/or access scripts hosted on the servers of ad companies whose URLs are blacklisted in the filters; so no matter what the designer does, those ads will not render.

For a whitelisting service to work, the standards would have to be reasonable, and it would have to be managed by a committee of Web professionals, advertisers, and ordinary users: not a "community" like ABP. Wladimar Palant (the plugin's original author) is actually one of the more reasonable voices over there, but no one pays attention to him anymore. It's gone from being a community to a mob.

Rich

 

[schmookeeg]

Clever, and hard to circumvent using JUST devtools (which people are getting hep to these days), but you still send the content down the wire, so they can actually see the content IN devtools.

it only takes something like this run in the js console to unwind:

var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
for(var i = 0; i < divs.length; i++){
divs.id = "";
}

Since you're already doing PHP on the serverside, couldn't you make a quick little service that matches the request for the ad itself and unlocks that IP for a minute? Still crude, but prevents the content being sent down the wire. You could have either JS, or since we're using stone tools here, an iframe, try to request the protected content from a server-side bit of code that "checks" for the all-clear before sending.

But I think that your way of using ABP against itself scratches 99% of your itch. It would be damn interesting content for me to spend 30 seconds to unravel this, and I'd be more likely to just leave the site, or in rare cases, hit the ABP icon and suffer the shilling I'd receive.

Strange uproar of idealism in this thread. Server owners can do whatever they want, including embracing irritating content protection methods. It just means people will find the content elsewhere, if they can. If they can't, more coins in your pocket.

 

[JeffDG]

Honestly, I see internet content providers going the way that broadcast TV is going, embedding advertising messages into the content seamlessly.

I remember a while ago seeing a box of ArcServe (a server backup product) on someone's desk in some medical show. That's embedded advertising and product placement.

So, the Washington post will have a story about some political dinner and there will be stuff like "The President arrived at the dinner at approximately 7:30, and sat down and enjoyed a cool refreshing Coca Cola, then took to the podium to deliver his remarks..."

 

[ClimbnSink]

Both sides are nuts.

 

[JoeSelch]

Most of the PPV / PPI ads (all of them actually, as far as I know) use JS to report back whether the image was rendered. ...

Thanks Rich!

 

[jsstevens]

Honestly, I see internet content providers going the way that broadcast TV is going, embedding advertising messages into the content seamlessly.

I remember a while ago seeing a box of ArcServe (a server backup product) on someone's desk in some medical show. That's embedded advertising and product placement.

So, the Washington post will have a story about some political dinner and there will be stuff like "The President arrived at the dinner at approximately 7:30, and sat down and enjoyed a cool refreshing Coca Cola, then took to the podium to deliver his remarks..."

Wow! That's a pretty esoteric product to use product placement for. I used to work for the company that built BackupExec before the one before it became Symantec. (Maynard Electronics->Archive->Conner->Seagate->Symantec. I left just before Seagate.) ArcServe was one of our competitors. But how many people would have a clue as to what it is much less a need for it.

John

 

[SkyHog]

Clever, and hard to circumvent using JUST devtools (which people are getting hep to these days), but you still send the content down the wire, so they can actually see the content IN devtools.

it only takes something like this run in the js console to unwind:

var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
for(var i = 0; i < divs.length; i++){
divs.id = "";
}

Since you're already doing PHP on the serverside, couldn't you make a quick little service that matches the request for the ad itself and unlocks that IP for a minute? Still crude, but prevents the content being sent down the wire. You could have either JS, or since we're using stone tools here, an iframe, try to request the protected content from a server-side bit of code that "checks" for the all-clear before sending.

But I think that your way of using ABP against itself scratches 99% of your itch. It would be damn interesting content for me to spend 30 seconds to unravel this, and I'd be more likely to just leave the site, or in rare cases, hit the ABP icon and suffer the shilling I'd receive.

Strange uproar of idealism in this thread. Server owners can do whatever they want, including embracing irritating content protection methods. It just means people will find the content elsewhere, if they can. If they can't, more coins in your pocket.

Not that I agree with the premise, but it seems to me that a fantastic way of handling this would be to use server side code to pull the ad image, and return only an <a href="insert bit.ly link here"><img>aasdflhj.jpg</img></a> would be pretty much unstoppable since that is a very common way of displaying content anyway.

All the tracking could be done server side as well. Just return an object spoofing an image, and blammo.

 

[schmookeeg]

Not that I agree with the premise, but it seems to me that a fantastic way of handling this would be to use server side code to pull the ad image, and return only an <a href="insert bit.ly link here"><img>aasdflhj.jpg</img></a> would be pretty much unstoppable since that is a very common way of displaying content anyway.

All the tracking could be done server side as well. Just return an object spoofing an image, and blammo.

The issue is then all of the image requests come from the server, and not the client machines -- the ad companies are paying for those uniques, and all of the fingerprint data they can get off of the client's browser, not the server's http interface. My understanding is that ABP also will kill the image request if it originates from the client, since it points to the (blacklisted) ad-server CDN

Building on OP's idea, I think the "whitelist image request" gets wrapped in one of those ID'ed divs (and not the ad itself, so it's unobtrusive to the other content), then JS or a postponed request pulls in the premium content if the image was served... would be a fun little thing to gin up in php, only a couple lines ... so a small or invisible png is the litmus test, and if it didn't get served, oopsie, premium content not found, have a redirect/paywall/whatever.

shower thoughts.

 

[RJM62]

Clever, and hard to circumvent using JUST devtools (which people are getting hep to these days), but you still send the content down the wire, so they can actually see the content IN devtools.

it only takes something like this run in the js console to unwind:

var divs = document.getElementsByTagName("div");
for(var i = 0; i < divs.length; i++){
divs.id = "";
}

Since you're already doing PHP on the serverside, couldn't you make a quick little service that matches the request for the ad itself and unlocks that IP for a minute? Still crude, but prevents the content being sent down the wire. You could have either JS, or since we're using stone tools here, an iframe, try to request the protected content from a server-side bit of code that "checks" for the all-clear before sending.

But I think that your way of using ABP against itself scratches 99% of your itch. It would be damn interesting content for me to spend 30 seconds to unravel this, and I'd be more likely to just leave the site, or in rare cases, hit the ABP icon and suffer the shilling I'd receive.

Strange uproar of idealism in this thread. Server owners can do whatever they want, including embracing irritating content protection methods. It just means people will find the content elsewhere, if they can. If they can't, more coins in your pocket.

Thanks. That's a pretty interesting idea. Gives me something to think about. And you're right about "scratching my itch." I admit to getting some pleasure out of turning the tables by using ABP's own blacklist against them.

Rich

 

[overdrive148]

Honestly, I see internet content providers going the way that broadcast TV is going, embedding advertising messages into the content seamlessly.

I remember a while ago seeing a box of ArcServe (a server backup product) on someone's desk in some medical show. That's embedded advertising and product placement.

So, the Washington post will have a story about some political dinner and there will be stuff like "The President arrived at the dinner at approximately 7:30, and sat down and enjoyed a cool refreshing Coca Cola, then took to the podium to deliver his remarks..."

"And now, the President's speech (Brought to you by Carl's Jr.)"

The worst ads for me are in capatchas. Watch a video and fill in a blank that says that X product is the most effective or regurgitating a slogan or something makes me cringe.

 

[Pilawt]

When Flight Service Stations were privatized, I wondered if this would be the future of weather briefings:

“This winds aloft forecast has been brought to you by Febreze. I’ll have the Papa John’s Pizza Pireps for you in just a moment, but first, there is a convective sigmet all along your route of flight. But I have good news. I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance …”

 

[denverpilot]

Honestly, I see internet content providers going the way that broadcast TV is going, embedding advertising messages into the content seamlessly.



I remember a while ago seeing a box of ArcServe (a server backup product) on someone's desk in some medical show. That's embedded advertising and product placement.



So, the Washington post will have a story about some political dinner and there will be stuff like "The President arrived at the dinner at approximately 7:30, and sat down and enjoyed a cool refreshing Coca Cola, then took to the podium to deliver his remarks..."

Polycom and Cisco have been battling with BIG money on TV shows for a long time. Watch the conference room technology used whenever there's a scene in a conference room or someone babbles to someone in the field via a speakerphone. There will be a nice shot of the phone and the logo sometime during the scene.