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This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that p
by luma 7y ago
This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.
- ziddoap 7y agoIndeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I think they want us to be angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure. My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.
- x0x0 7y agoI was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.
- randomstring 7y agoMaybe Autotrader has hundreds of thousands of template, CSS, and JS files with those paths hardcoded. Imagine the hell it would be to work on that website. Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.
- dilutedh2o 7y agoI would love to see an example of something like this. Please.
- therealx 7y agoI've seen backends that were that horrible. Updates were often done via regex's.
- dilutedh2o 7y agoThat's basically half of my day to day at the moment, that's why I'm wondering
- mfontani 7y agoI do wonder why they couldn't "just" support both old and new URL paths using something like this: RewriteRule "^/+new_path/+(.+)$" /advert/$1 [L] ... for each "new url path" (as, granted, they had quite a few which matched "advert". ... but that's also something they could again fix with another RewriteRule, I guess? RewriteRule "^(.*)/+new_path/+(.+)$" $1/advert/$2 [L] ... would've worked just as well?
- cat199 7y agowhy should an e-commerce focused site do anything at all to avoid the term 'advert' in the first place? anyone there is ostensibly interested in commerce/advertising.. list maintainers should be responsible regression test their lists for normal content and not do dumb things this is also a problem with bad/unscrupulous spam listings which list domains based on unsubstantiated requests, etc
- Nextgrid 7y agoYou can choose to buy things online without being exposed to the cancer that is advertising. I am against advertising and marketing and yet spend a considerable amount of money online, and I’m confident most of HN does the same.
- xorcist 7y agoIt's probably not that it's hard to type sed -i but that they can not change URLs so easily. It might be price indexing engines, external partners authorized to edit certain paths, and any number of other things. If parts of your audience blocks ads then it's probably a good idea to test your web site with uBlock installed, just as you already test with Safari and MSIE. It's specifically not a good idea to rely on the block list maintainers who will have a hard time separating earnest bug reports from all the bogus ones who think they've found a clever way to avoid blocklists.
- skybrian 7y agoIsn't it a bit disconcerting that we're so used to articles telling us what to feel that, when they don't do that, we get confused? Maybe it's good just to have a reminder that much of our infrastructure is maintained by volunteers. Sometimes important policy decisions get made by whoever showed up and started doing the work in a way that looks competent to others.
- ziddoap 7y agoI don't think its disconcerting at all. Articles are supposed to have a point, a goal, etc. The goal might be persuasive, it might be to establish facts, it might be to argue for a specific change or against one. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with what the article has laid out. But we need something to agree or disagree with. In this case, I had no idea what the point of the article was (beyond a vague feeling that the author doesn't like EasyList).
- radisb 7y agoWhy does an article necessarily have to have a point? Why cant it just lay the facts and let the reader process them and judge them and feel about them how ever the reader wants?
- donarb 7y agoHere's the forum thread in question. The suggested fix from EasyList was to rename a folder on AT's server from /advert/. As AT explained this folder was part of the URL for hundreds of thousands of cars and that the URL was used not only by the website, but other systems as well that move data around. In the end of the thread, you can see that the problem was fixed between EasyList and Autotrader. https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148 https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148
- swinglock 7y agoSound like a job for 301 Moved Permanently or just keeping both the new and old URLs valid but change to the new on the user facing pages.
- auslander 7y ago> .. it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests They responded and removed amp-analytics. I'm not that impressed. https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/8311 https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/8311
- OrgNet 7y agomakes me want to avoid Autotrader... where did this /advert/ come from anyways...
- jarofgreen 7y agoI haven't looked, but I'm guessing ... When you list a second hand car for sale, that's an "advert". Sometimes the adverts are the content you want :-)
- OrgNet 7y agoso they probably could have used /vehicle/, to be more specific
- FussyZeus 7y agoAlso as a quick aside, they mention that AutoTrader would've had to fix "hundreds of thousands of pages" and I'm calling bullshit. No site of that magnitude is using straight up HTML pages. Even if it's a jekyll thing where you'd have to change a bunch of templates, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the required changes could be done in a few seconds with any decent text editor.
- bredren 7y agoI would not be surprised if they are telling the truth here. I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages. The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav. I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups of pages used subtly different html it was a real mess. It took a long time for them to get all the pages replicated in a templating system to avoid seo loss.
- FussyZeus 7y agoThe thing is though that's a bad system, whether EasyList is prompting the changes, or the SEO, etc. and it feels like they're trying to pin "we had to fix thousands of pages" on EasyList as though their shit workflow is EasyLists' fault.
- donarb 7y agoThe thing is is that AutoTrader is a website that advertises cars, they don't even have any other advertising on their site. And because EasyList doesn't like a word in their URL, the website breaks through no fault of their own. If the owner of the website is doing nothing wrong, the onus is on the owner of the blocking technology to come up with a system that works correctly.
- ksangeelee 7y agoI just visited the AutoTrader site (from the UK), and uBlock Origin blocked 34 requests related to ads and tracking. I recall in the past having been surprised at the number of extra requests being made via their site. They don't serve only vehicle listings.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jordanpg 7y agoLet us hope that we are entering the last chapter in the life of the absurd ad-based business model that the internet has been built upon thus far. It makes me giddy to consider how much the quality of the internet will improve when the bottom-feeders are at last excluded from it.
- neilv 7y agoIf HN is going to upvote suspicious articles, maybe we could have a separate voting system in the corner of the HN article page, for guessing whether some third party initiated the article. > "It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this," said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. If only there were a business service that might help me navigate this perilousness of which I have just learned, so that I might better monetize.
- sp332 7y agoEasylist is not well maintained, and sometimes they have really petty arguments with website owners instead of just fixing rules that break actual content. For example, they have a specific list of sites that are not allowed to show Amazon affiliate links. They don't block all such links as a policy or anything, it just breaks specific websites. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=37621623#p37621623 https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=37621623#p3762...
- stefan_ 7y agoI've read the EasyList forum thread linked above for the AutoTrader site, and the issue there was indeed a generic rule that just breaks every link containing advert. That is some monumental, unfathomable stupidity. And instead of realizing that, they have the gall to refer to that rule existing for a very long time! The same issue was seen with Spamhaus and similar IP block services for eMail spam. What were selfless intentions quickly morphed into ineffective, power-crazed gatekeepers and extortion artists that have made SMTP an unusable protocol unless you are Google or Amazon.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sincarne 7y agoDigiday are a trade pub for the online advertising and “sponsored content” industry. You bet they want you to be upset about ad blocking.