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Sounds like a very small phase in a cat-and-mouse chase. The people who use AdBlock are pretty technically savvy, they'll jump on another plug-in that bypasses

Sounds like a very small phase in a cat-and-mouse chase. The people who use AdBlock are pretty technically savvy, they'll jump on another plug-in that bypasses the hack you've just mentioned in no time. And the hack doesn't work anyway for some existing popular adblock extensions. Perhaps it would be more worthwhile to move to a different model altogether.

radu_floricica 17y ago
Many technical minded people tend to think that if something will eventually fail, it's not worth doing. There's an old joke about a horse trainer who was ordered by his king, under penalty of death, to teach his horse to speak. So he very methodically starts to do just that. When asked why he's trying to do the impossible, he answers: "Teaching takes a long time. Maybe the king dies. Maybe the horse dies. Or maybe the horse learns to talk."
- jrockway 17y ago
  Maybe Adblock is updated the next day, and you basically wasted your afternoon. Time you will never get back, all for nothing.
axod 17y ago
afaik, modifying css or not loading the advert is the most common adblock approach. To do anything lower level would be far harder. One of the whole points of adblock is also to reduce bandwidth usage on the client side, increase load speed etc. So if you're using adblock and not loading ads from the server, that behavior is obvious and easily detected. Advertising works extremely well. A very small minority of users decide to block all advertising without even giving websites the chance to show value in it. I disagree about adBlock being tech savvy. Most of the time it's just doing regexps on iframe/image sources. Which is ridiculously naive. Is this an ad? <a href=/foo.html>beds</a>. Definitely could be, yes. Can adblock block it? Nope. If adblock did become more widespread (I doubt it will), then the advertising would just move server side, and become more hidden so that it can't be detected. You'll stop seeing <iframe src="http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382&#62 http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382> and you'll start seeing <iframe src="http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html&#62 http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html> What's this alternate model you've devised for the web? Say we removed all advertising from the web, how much money would we each have to pay a day to replace that revenue? How many of us would be willing to pay to use the web like that? I know I wouldn't.
- jrockway 17y ago
  You'll stop seeing <iframe src="http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382> http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382>; and you'll start seeing <iframe src="http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html> http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html>; Some sites do this. In that case, you can guess that something is an ad based on the size of the image -- advertisers like to buy ads in standard-sized chunks, and you can just block all images that are that size. Adblock also uses filters available from the Internet that automatically update at a certain interval. So if foo.com is even moderately popular, the filterset will be updated to block your site's ads reasonably quickly. Finally, NoScript solves the problem of your adblock detector. If I don't run your detection code, the callback will not be called.
  - axod 17y ago
    >> "Finally, NoScript solves the problem of your adblock detector. If I don't run your detection code, the callback will not be called." So just deny access if the callback isn't called with false :/ eg only render the content if the callback is called with false. The number of people browsing with js disabled is pretty moot these days.
    - jrockway 17y ago
      The number of people browsing with js disabled is pretty moot these days. The number of people using Javascript to deny access to their site is pretty low these days. If that increases, the number of people blocking Javascript will increase. I guarantee you that if someone wants to see the content on your site without ads, they will see the content on your site without ads. For example, you could just draw a white square over the ads instead of blocking them completely. You could make the DOM API return "uh sure, the ad is there", but not actually display it on the screen. You're fighting a losing battle, and because adblockers are auto-updateable, even small victories won't last long. It's probably a better use of your time to do something, anything, else. It's like DRM -- a lot of development time sunk, just to hurt legitimate users. It doesn't make sense.
      - 17y ago

radu_floricica 17y ago

Many technical minded people tend to think that if something will eventually fail, it's not worth doing. There's an old joke about a horse trainer who was ordered by his king, under penalty of death, to teach his horse to speak. So he very methodically starts to do just that. When asked why he's trying to do the impossible, he answers: "Teaching takes a long time. Maybe the king dies. Maybe the horse dies. Or maybe the horse learns to talk."

jrockway 17y ago
Maybe Adblock is updated the next day, and you basically wasted your afternoon. Time you will never get back, all for nothing.

axod 17y ago

afaik, modifying css or not loading the advert is the most common adblock approach. To do anything lower level would be far harder. One of the whole points of adblock is also to reduce bandwidth usage on the client side, increase load speed etc. So if you're using adblock and not loading ads from the server, that behavior is obvious and easily detected. Advertising works extremely well. A very small minority of users decide to block all advertising without even giving websites the chance to show value in it. I disagree about adBlock being tech savvy. Most of the time it's just doing regexps on iframe/image sources. Which is ridiculously naive. Is this an ad? <a href=/foo.html>beds</a>. Definitely could be, yes. Can adblock block it? Nope. If adblock did become more widespread (I doubt it will), then the advertising would just move server side, and become more hidden so that it can't be detected. You'll stop seeing <iframe src="http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382&#62 http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382> and you'll start seeing <iframe src="http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html&#62 http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html> What's this alternate model you've devised for the web? Say we removed all advertising from the web, how much money would we each have to pay a day to replace that revenue? How many of us would be willing to pay to use the web like that? I know I wouldn't.

jrockway 17y ago
You'll stop seeing <iframe src="http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382> http://adserver.foo.com/?id=7382>; and you'll start seeing <iframe src="http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html> http://www.foo.com/content/7382.html>; Some sites do this. In that case, you can guess that something is an ad based on the size of the image -- advertisers like to buy ads in standard-sized chunks, and you can just block all images that are that size. Adblock also uses filters available from the Internet that automatically update at a certain interval. So if foo.com is even moderately popular, the filterset will be updated to block your site's ads reasonably quickly. Finally, NoScript solves the problem of your adblock detector. If I don't run your detection code, the callback will not be called.
- axod 17y ago
  >> "Finally, NoScript solves the problem of your adblock detector. If I don't run your detection code, the callback will not be called." So just deny access if the callback isn't called with false :/ eg only render the content if the callback is called with false. The number of people browsing with js disabled is pretty moot these days.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    The number of people browsing with js disabled is pretty moot these days. The number of people using Javascript to deny access to their site is pretty low these days. If that increases, the number of people blocking Javascript will increase. I guarantee you that if someone wants to see the content on your site without ads, they will see the content on your site without ads. For example, you could just draw a white square over the ads instead of blocking them completely. You could make the DOM API return "uh sure, the ad is there", but not actually display it on the screen. You're fighting a losing battle, and because adblockers are auto-updateable, even small victories won't last long. It's probably a better use of your time to do something, anything, else. It's like DRM -- a lot of development time sunk, just to hurt legitimate users. It doesn't make sense.
    - 17y ago