7 ms·

Filtering out newsletter signup forms embedded in web articles

62 points by k1m 5y ago

tzahifadida 5y ago
Actually I think that a lot of newsletters of professionals i am interested in are worthy and these are edge cases. I will be more worried not seeing these because they were filtered out by some plugin. I would say that if a site has a harassing newsletter then the whole site is probably not worth my time.
- Fnoord 5y ago
  If I want to sign-up to a newsletter from a company I will usually find it either manually, or I subscribe to their RSS feed. In almost every case I visit a website, I do not want to subscribe to a newsletter. Therefore, it distracts from my goal. To draw a parallel: in almost every case I start up an Android application, I do not want to rate the Android application. I don't want to spend any time on either of such nonsense. In fact, from today on, I will rate applications on Android which ask me to rate them a bad rating just because I'm done with that spam. As for newsletters, if I want them, I will find them. Take for example Bruce Schneier's blog. You can find the newsletter without getting spammed about it. That's the correct way.
- inshadows 5y ago
  I also think that hiding newsletter sign up forms is bad, because you lose the ability to detect that the site is just a blog spam. Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles offer newsletters.
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    > Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles offer newsletters. The thing is, ever since Google Reader got terminated, the user base of RSS/Atom clients has been steadily dropping down. Firefox IIRC terminated "dynamic bookmarks" years ago, and even back when it existed it didn't support notification. Yes, us nerd crowd knows that RSS exists, but ever tried asking your boss or your teenage kid what "Atom" is? Actual mail newsletters are the only way left other than even more obnoxious browser push nags to get your users notified that you have new content.
    - inshadows 5y ago
      Your point is valid. Still, I find that most "blogs" offering newsletters these days are frivolous content dumping ground, and the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. EDIT: Lots of such noise (often appearing here on HN) comes from Substack.
      - k1m 5y ago
        > the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. Another appeal of newsletters I think is distrust (rightly in my opinion) in corporate algorithms powering people's feeds. I'd love to see more widespread adoption of RSS again, rather than a push to get everyone signed up to a bunch of different email newsletters. Perhaps once people feel overwhelmed with their inbox getting filled with email newsletters, RSS will make a resurgence. I wrote the piece linked here, and it wasn't intended to be an anti-newsletter post. Just against newsletters being pushed on readers in the middle of the article they've started reading, as opposed to a sidebar or at the end of the article. We have web apps that produce stripped-down articles to be read on e-readers or printed out. These newsletter signup requests often blend into the content as just another paragraph of text, which can be a little jarring when you're engrossed in reading. Quite a few of the writers I like are on Substack, and earn money through it. Substack also offers full-text RSS feeds (for publicly-accessible content, not sure what level of RSS support there is for paid content - perhaps that's still email-only). And their Reader has RSS support too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 - I hope that's a sign that they'll be doing more with RSS in the future.
    - Breza 5y ago
      I still miss Google Reader. I wonder if Google wishes it had kept it running now that their efforts to launch social networks failed and Twitter/Facebook have taken over much of the space that RSS used to occupy. Google could have built such a huge dataset of individual-level reader preferences (not saying that's the best use of RSS, just that there's a business case).
  - shortformblog 5y ago
    Hi, I run a long-form newsletter. I send it out twice a week. I spend many bleary nights putting content together for it, and its pieces occasionally appear here on Hacker News. I do a lot of research for it—and pay lots of money for tools to access that research. I often do interviews. It often brings in contributors. Those contributors are paid. It has an RSS feed as a service to readers. But it was built as a newsletter because I specifically wanted to experiment with that form and felt that I could do interesting things with it. Since I started it six and a half years ago, a couple interesting things have happened in the sector: One, the interest in building a business model around blogs has shifted over to the newsletter space. And two, people who wouldn’t have paid to access a blog now are willing to pay to access a newsletter. I like to keep my content open to a large amount of people, so I rely on newsletter sponsorships as a business model, but my advertising approach is very minimal compared to other publishers. I’m not particularly aggressive with my signup form—I run it at the top of my front page and put a pop-up option at the bottom of the article, and sometimes I implement an occasional interstitial when an article seems like it’s doing very well and I want to catch the user’s eye. But I don’t do as much as I could. It probably could be larger if I did. But this isn’t about me. This is about this comment. Which is to say: This is a really cruel thing to say about newsletters. I know a lot of creators who put hours of work into their newsletters each week on top of full-time gigs, grinding it out with the goal of hoping to do something with that newsletter. It also ignores the business realities of the newsletter space. Trying to build a blog into a business is really tough these days (it was back then too, something I know because I was blogging back then). But newsletters have created a path of opportunity for those who want to build things independently. And while I will never claim that the work they do is perfect, it’s certainly not blog spam. So I request, hey, maybe research the space before you use such a broad brush. Thanks.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
ta988 5y ago
Website owners are desperate to capture your attention, they have a few seconds to do so. What they don't realize is that beong annoying is also what causes people to only stay for a few seconds on their site. For me it is a good sign of someone who cares more about advertisement than content so it makes me close the page 99% of the time.
- unknown_error 5y ago
  Totally agreed... if only I could get management to listen too. If were it up to me as a dev, there would NEVER be popups/overlays. We spend forever optimizing UX before and during site design, only to have some middle manager come in at the last minute and say "We need a newsletter modal signup to drive conversions." They end up chasing signup numbers instead of overall user satisfaction.
- blowski 5y ago
  People say this on HN all the time, but from my experience doing watching real users, it’s not true for most people on most websites. If we believe the information is useful, we’ll stay, regardless of how (un)appealing we find the design. In my experience, most people interpret minimalist websites as being run by small, poor companies. Thus, a flashy website is the equivalent of renting a Ferrari to drive to an interview. It fools a lot of people - even some of us technical folk more often than we realise.
bartvk 5y ago
Personally I use the "No, Thanks" extension. It costs a bit of money. Daniel Kladnik, the developer, provides you with an invoice so you can deduct it as a business, or ask your boss to pay. https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/ https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/ Note that I haven't compared it to Fanboy's Annoyance List mentioned in the article. Ages ago, I just wanted a no-configure option.
- traceroute66 5y ago
  I'm afraid I take issue with your "ask your boss to pay" statement. As someone who has been involved with running small businesses, I can tell you that "the boss" very quickly gets annoyed with employees who nickle & dime their employer and try to get "the boss" to pay things that the employee should be paying for. Sure if a piece of software, hardware or a service is an essential part of your work (e.g. mobile phones for field engineers) then it should be paid for in an appropriate manner by "the boss" (or a suitable alternative provided, e.g. company phone). No question, no argument. But frankly, ad-blockers or other non-essentials ? Forget about it. Being a "good boss" includes being able to draw a line in the sand somewhere. A "bad boss" is one who thinks "the company" can pay for everything "just because" is doing the themselves, their employees and their company a disservice. Businesses are not charities and everyone should be doing their bit to keep overheads in control. Not only that. But in some jurisdictions the local tax authorities will make taxation differentiation between items that are of demonstrable business needs and those that are not. This tax differentiation may not only impact the business itself, but your own personal tax situation too.
  - Permit 5y ago
    > Being a "good boss" includes being able to draw a line in the sand somewhere. A "bad boss" is one who thinks "the company" can pay for everything "just because" is doing the themselves, their employees and their company a disservice. I have never met an employee who would characterize a “good boss” this way. At the very least I would not expect these qualities to win you any favours with prospective employees. No one looks at “free work lunches” as some negative reflection of their boss’ financial acumen. The closest complaint I could think of is that the employee would rather that money go directly into their pocket. Maybe there is a middle ground here where you could allocate $50/year for these sort of expenditures in order to prevent them from getting out of hand? I’m not sure, but I would consider reflecting on what really makes a “good boss” and whether or not your employees would agree with you on it. To me the distinction between a good boss and a bad one is always decided by the employees, never the boss.
rchaud 5y ago
This by far is by biggest pet peeve of reading online: an article can't even be shown in full. It has to be broken up into disembodied sections, with ads, newsletter signups, or a block of links appearing every few paragraphs. Fortunately, the NYT appears to have scaled back on this. I'm finding that I can do "Print to PDF" on the majority of articles (excl. interactive stories) and the layout is very clean with no interruptions. If that changes, I still have the option of going to FF's "reading view" and Print to PDF from there.
- k1m 5y ago
  > This by far is by biggest pet peeve of reading online: an article can't even be shown in full. It has to be broken up into disembodied sections, with ads, newsletter signups, or a block of links appearing every few paragraphs. Absolutely. I'm actually a little worried that with the growing popularity of utility-first CSS and build tools that replace semantic information on HTML elements with randomly generated values, it's going to be increasingly difficult to have filter lists remove these. Currently the selectors in Fanboy's Annoyance List target semantic attributes, e.g. "newsletter-widget", but already there are a lot of sites that don't contain any semantic info around the sections that aren't a part of the content. The BBC website is one example, they have a list of related links between paragraphs of text on many articles, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57464097 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57464097. This is the HTML markup: <div data-component="unordered-list-block" class="ssrcss-uf6wea-RichTextComponentWrapper e1xue1i84"> <div class="ssrcss-18snukc-RichTextContainer e5tfeyi1"> <div class="ssrcss-1pzprxn-BulletListContainer e5tfeyi0"> <ul role="list"> <li>[related link 1]</li> <li>[related link 2]</li> <li>[related link 3]</li> </ul> </div> </div> </div> These are just related links randomly inserted into the content, but no clear attribute values marking them as such, making automatic removal difficult. > If that changes, I still have the option of going to FF's "reading view" and Print to PDF from there. FF's reading view does well on a lot of articles. It handles the BBC situation above quite well, but not others (see for example the screenshot in our article with the newsletter signup).
  - rchaud 5y ago
    I'm not a web developer (more like a hobbyist), so I never used tools like Webpack to run 'builds'. Someone recently explained this phenomenon to me when I asked about the nonsensical class names I was seeing on some websites. I now understand that those machine-generated classes are designed to prevent styling conflicts on modern websites where multiple developers' work may appear on a single page. But with adblockers currently set up to detect cruft via class names, I'm thinking that the clock is ticking on how long these lists remain accurate.
greggturkington 5y ago
I keep a long list of these I can contribute. The authors need to take more advantage of fuzzy attribute matching. Really go after those patterns you see frequently from Mailchimp and other major newsletter vendors first! [class*="mc_embed_signup"] [id*="mc_embed_signup"] [class*="FreeNewsletter" i] [class*="inline-newsletter"] [class*="newsletter-article"] [class*="newsletter-form"] [class*="newsletter-signup"] [class*="newsletter-tout"] [class*="newsletter-widget"] [class*="NewsletterCard" i] [class*="NewsletterSignup" i] [class*="newssignup"] [id*="SignupForm" i] [id*="signupWrapper" i] CSS isn't so simple anymore though, with CSS-in-JS we're moving away from deterministic class name. We can still target other attributes with CSS though, which I don't see used in these lists nearly enough, for example data attributes: [data-title*="Mailchimp"]
- nmstoker 5y ago
  Maybe I've simply not seen it but it seems odd that there isn't a minification/obfuscation tool that can alter the CSS names to be impenetrable to users. The challenge would be to figure a way for an organisation, or at least set of pages, to keep self consistent obfuscated CSS (after all you'd probably want the cached content to work without having each one to have its own CSS, which wouldn't work if the obfuscation was done independently by each developer). Something happening at the Prod web server level would be ideally placed though.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    You've not seen Instagram?
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    Doing this will make website hits tank, significantly (unless there's lock-in). Then anyone looking at the stats will ask for the change to be reverted.
  - tyingq 5y ago
    It appears that using webpack or similar to generate truncated hashes as class names is somewhat common: https://develoger.com/how-to-obfuscate-css-class-names-with-react-and-webpack-20e2b5c49cda https://develoger.com/how-to-obfuscate-css-class-names-with-... Webpack has a parameter called localIdentName where you specify the pattern.
kilroy123 5y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't think these are that big of a deal? I'd gladly take this over a big ugly ad. Hell ANY ad at all.
betwixthewires 5y ago
Most of what I do in a browser is read documents. News articles, blogs, those kinds of things. So I just turn off everything using umatrix BT default. CSS, JS, everything except first party images. It works very well. I'd rather scroll through broken formatting to get to the meat I'm trying to get to than tolerate a nonstandard UI just to read a document. I use some web apps (like HN or github) and so I change settings for those sites. My rule of thumb is if your site isn't a web app you I don't need anything but HTML. Every so often I get third party images or other media that I want to see, so I turn it on. And every so often I get a page that I am only expecting a document but instead get a blank page, indicating to me that they require scripts to be on to receive a text document. I immediately as a rule close them. If you need to see where my cursor is or whatever just for me to read what you have to say I'm not interested in reading what you have written.

62 points by k1m 5y ago

Actually I think that a lot of newsletters of professionals i am interested in are worthy and these are edge cases. I will be more worried not seeing these because they were filtered out by some plugin. I would say that if a site has a harassing newsletter then the whole site is probably not worth my time.

Fnoord 5y ago
If I want to sign-up to a newsletter from a company I will usually find it either manually, or I subscribe to their RSS feed. In almost every case I visit a website, I do not want to subscribe to a newsletter. Therefore, it distracts from my goal. To draw a parallel: in almost every case I start up an Android application, I do not want to rate the Android application. I don't want to spend any time on either of such nonsense. In fact, from today on, I will rate applications on Android which ask me to rate them a bad rating just because I'm done with that spam. As for newsletters, if I want them, I will find them. Take for example Bruce Schneier's blog. You can find the newsletter without getting spammed about it. That's the correct way.
inshadows 5y ago
I also think that hiding newsletter sign up forms is bad, because you lose the ability to detect that the site is just a blog spam. Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles offer newsletters.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Real blogs offer RSS/Atom. Only those freaks fighting for user engagement dumping zero content articles offer newsletters. The thing is, ever since Google Reader got terminated, the user base of RSS/Atom clients has been steadily dropping down. Firefox IIRC terminated "dynamic bookmarks" years ago, and even back when it existed it didn't support notification. Yes, us nerd crowd knows that RSS exists, but ever tried asking your boss or your teenage kid what "Atom" is? Actual mail newsletters are the only way left other than even more obnoxious browser push nags to get your users notified that you have new content.
  - inshadows 5y ago
    Your point is valid. Still, I find that most "blogs" offering newsletters these days are frivolous content dumping ground, and the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. EDIT: Lots of such noise (often appearing here on HN) comes from Substack.
    - k1m 5y ago
      > the reason for their existence is likely just building Internet persona or something. Another appeal of newsletters I think is distrust (rightly in my opinion) in corporate algorithms powering people's feeds. I'd love to see more widespread adoption of RSS again, rather than a push to get everyone signed up to a bunch of different email newsletters. Perhaps once people feel overwhelmed with their inbox getting filled with email newsletters, RSS will make a resurgence. I wrote the piece linked here, and it wasn't intended to be an anti-newsletter post. Just against newsletters being pushed on readers in the middle of the article they've started reading, as opposed to a sidebar or at the end of the article. We have web apps that produce stripped-down articles to be read on e-readers or printed out. These newsletter signup requests often blend into the content as just another paragraph of text, which can be a little jarring when you're engrossed in reading. Quite a few of the writers I like are on Substack, and earn money through it. Substack also offers full-text RSS feeds (for publicly-accessible content, not sure what level of RSS support there is for paid content - perhaps that's still email-only). And their Reader has RSS support too - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25444507 - I hope that's a sign that they'll be doing more with RSS in the future.
  - Breza 5y ago
    I still miss Google Reader. I wonder if Google wishes it had kept it running now that their efforts to launch social networks failed and Twitter/Facebook have taken over much of the space that RSS used to occupy. Google could have built such a huge dataset of individual-level reader preferences (not saying that's the best use of RSS, just that there's a business case).
- shortformblog 5y ago
  Hi, I run a long-form newsletter. I send it out twice a week. I spend many bleary nights putting content together for it, and its pieces occasionally appear here on Hacker News. I do a lot of research for it—and pay lots of money for tools to access that research. I often do interviews. It often brings in contributors. Those contributors are paid. It has an RSS feed as a service to readers. But it was built as a newsletter because I specifically wanted to experiment with that form and felt that I could do interesting things with it. Since I started it six and a half years ago, a couple interesting things have happened in the sector: One, the interest in building a business model around blogs has shifted over to the newsletter space. And two, people who wouldn’t have paid to access a blog now are willing to pay to access a newsletter. I like to keep my content open to a large amount of people, so I rely on newsletter sponsorships as a business model, but my advertising approach is very minimal compared to other publishers. I’m not particularly aggressive with my signup form—I run it at the top of my front page and put a pop-up option at the bottom of the article, and sometimes I implement an occasional interstitial when an article seems like it’s doing very well and I want to catch the user’s eye. But I don’t do as much as I could. It probably could be larger if I did. But this isn’t about me. This is about this comment. Which is to say: This is a really cruel thing to say about newsletters. I know a lot of creators who put hours of work into their newsletters each week on top of full-time gigs, grinding it out with the goal of hoping to do something with that newsletter. It also ignores the business realities of the newsletter space. Trying to build a blog into a business is really tough these days (it was back then too, something I know because I was blogging back then). But newsletters have created a path of opportunity for those who want to build things independently. And while I will never claim that the work they do is perfect, it’s certainly not blog spam. So I request, hey, maybe research the space before you use such a broad brush. Thanks.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

ta988 5y ago

Website owners are desperate to capture your attention, they have a few seconds to do so. What they don't realize is that beong annoying is also what causes people to only stay for a few seconds on their site. For me it is a good sign of someone who cares more about advertisement than content so it makes me close the page 99% of the time.

unknown_error 5y ago
Totally agreed... if only I could get management to listen too. If were it up to me as a dev, there would NEVER be popups/overlays. We spend forever optimizing UX before and during site design, only to have some middle manager come in at the last minute and say "We need a newsletter modal signup to drive conversions." They end up chasing signup numbers instead of overall user satisfaction.
blowski 5y ago
People say this on HN all the time, but from my experience doing watching real users, it’s not true for most people on most websites. If we believe the information is useful, we’ll stay, regardless of how (un)appealing we find the design. In my experience, most people interpret minimalist websites as being run by small, poor companies. Thus, a flashy website is the equivalent of renting a Ferrari to drive to an interview. It fools a lot of people - even some of us technical folk more often than we realise.

bartvk 5y ago

Personally I use the "No, Thanks" extension. It costs a bit of money. Daniel Kladnik, the developer, provides you with an invoice so you can deduct it as a business, or ask your boss to pay. https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/ https://www.no-thanks-extension.com/ Note that I haven't compared it to Fanboy's Annoyance List mentioned in the article. Ages ago, I just wanted a no-configure option.

traceroute66 5y ago
I'm afraid I take issue with your "ask your boss to pay" statement. As someone who has been involved with running small businesses, I can tell you that "the boss" very quickly gets annoyed with employees who nickle & dime their employer and try to get "the boss" to pay things that the employee should be paying for. Sure if a piece of software, hardware or a service is an essential part of your work (e.g. mobile phones for field engineers) then it should be paid for in an appropriate manner by "the boss" (or a suitable alternative provided, e.g. company phone). No question, no argument. But frankly, ad-blockers or other non-essentials ? Forget about it. Being a "good boss" includes being able to draw a line in the sand somewhere. A "bad boss" is one who thinks "the company" can pay for everything "just because" is doing the themselves, their employees and their company a disservice. Businesses are not charities and everyone should be doing their bit to keep overheads in control. Not only that. But in some jurisdictions the local tax authorities will make taxation differentiation between items that are of demonstrable business needs and those that are not. This tax differentiation may not only impact the business itself, but your own personal tax situation too.
- Permit 5y ago
  > Being a "good boss" includes being able to draw a line in the sand somewhere. A "bad boss" is one who thinks "the company" can pay for everything "just because" is doing the themselves, their employees and their company a disservice. I have never met an employee who would characterize a “good boss” this way. At the very least I would not expect these qualities to win you any favours with prospective employees. No one looks at “free work lunches” as some negative reflection of their boss’ financial acumen. The closest complaint I could think of is that the employee would rather that money go directly into their pocket. Maybe there is a middle ground here where you could allocate $50/year for these sort of expenditures in order to prevent them from getting out of hand? I’m not sure, but I would consider reflecting on what really makes a “good boss” and whether or not your employees would agree with you on it. To me the distinction between a good boss and a bad one is always decided by the employees, never the boss.

rchaud 5y ago

This by far is by biggest pet peeve of reading online: an article can't even be shown in full. It has to be broken up into disembodied sections, with ads, newsletter signups, or a block of links appearing every few paragraphs. Fortunately, the NYT appears to have scaled back on this. I'm finding that I can do "Print to PDF" on the majority of articles (excl. interactive stories) and the layout is very clean with no interruptions. If that changes, I still have the option of going to FF's "reading view" and Print to PDF from there.

k1m 5y ago
> This by far is by biggest pet peeve of reading online: an article can't even be shown in full. It has to be broken up into disembodied sections, with ads, newsletter signups, or a block of links appearing every few paragraphs. Absolutely. I'm actually a little worried that with the growing popularity of utility-first CSS and build tools that replace semantic information on HTML elements with randomly generated values, it's going to be increasingly difficult to have filter lists remove these. Currently the selectors in Fanboy's Annoyance List target semantic attributes, e.g. "newsletter-widget", but already there are a lot of sites that don't contain any semantic info around the sections that aren't a part of the content. The BBC website is one example, they have a list of related links between paragraphs of text on many articles, e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57464097 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57464097. This is the HTML markup: <div data-component="unordered-list-block" class="ssrcss-uf6wea-RichTextComponentWrapper e1xue1i84"> <div class="ssrcss-18snukc-RichTextContainer e5tfeyi1"> <div class="ssrcss-1pzprxn-BulletListContainer e5tfeyi0"> <ul role="list"> <li>[related link 1]</li> <li>[related link 2]</li> <li>[related link 3]</li> </ul> </div> </div> </div> These are just related links randomly inserted into the content, but no clear attribute values marking them as such, making automatic removal difficult. > If that changes, I still have the option of going to FF's "reading view" and Print to PDF from there. FF's reading view does well on a lot of articles. It handles the BBC situation above quite well, but not others (see for example the screenshot in our article with the newsletter signup).
- rchaud 5y ago
  I'm not a web developer (more like a hobbyist), so I never used tools like Webpack to run 'builds'. Someone recently explained this phenomenon to me when I asked about the nonsensical class names I was seeing on some websites. I now understand that those machine-generated classes are designed to prevent styling conflicts on modern websites where multiple developers' work may appear on a single page. But with adblockers currently set up to detect cruft via class names, I'm thinking that the clock is ticking on how long these lists remain accurate.

greggturkington 5y ago

I keep a long list of these I can contribute. The authors need to take more advantage of fuzzy attribute matching. Really go after those patterns you see frequently from Mailchimp and other major newsletter vendors first! [class*="mc_embed_signup"] [id*="mc_embed_signup"] [class*="FreeNewsletter" i] [class*="inline-newsletter"] [class*="newsletter-article"] [class*="newsletter-form"] [class*="newsletter-signup"] [class*="newsletter-tout"] [class*="newsletter-widget"] [class*="NewsletterCard" i] [class*="NewsletterSignup" i] [class*="newssignup"] [id*="SignupForm" i] [id*="signupWrapper" i] CSS isn't so simple anymore though, with CSS-in-JS we're moving away from deterministic class name. We can still target other attributes with CSS though, which I don't see used in these lists nearly enough, for example data attributes: [data-title*="Mailchimp"]

nmstoker 5y ago
Maybe I've simply not seen it but it seems odd that there isn't a minification/obfuscation tool that can alter the CSS names to be impenetrable to users. The challenge would be to figure a way for an organisation, or at least set of pages, to keep self consistent obfuscated CSS (after all you'd probably want the cached content to work without having each one to have its own CSS, which wouldn't work if the obfuscation was done independently by each developer). Something happening at the Prod web server level would be ideally placed though.
- pjc50 5y ago
  You've not seen Instagram?
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  Doing this will make website hits tank, significantly (unless there's lock-in). Then anyone looking at the stats will ask for the change to be reverted.
- tyingq 5y ago
  It appears that using webpack or similar to generate truncated hashes as class names is somewhat common: https://develoger.com/how-to-obfuscate-css-class-names-with-react-and-webpack-20e2b5c49cda https://develoger.com/how-to-obfuscate-css-class-names-with-... Webpack has a parameter called localIdentName where you specify the pattern.

kilroy123 5y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't think these are that big of a deal? I'd gladly take this over a big ugly ad. Hell ANY ad at all.

betwixthewires 5y ago

Most of what I do in a browser is read documents. News articles, blogs, those kinds of things. So I just turn off everything using umatrix BT default. CSS, JS, everything except first party images. It works very well. I'd rather scroll through broken formatting to get to the meat I'm trying to get to than tolerate a nonstandard UI just to read a document. I use some web apps (like HN or github) and so I change settings for those sites. My rule of thumb is if your site isn't a web app you I don't need anything but HTML. Every so often I get third party images or other media that I want to see, so I turn it on. And every so often I get a page that I am only expecting a document but instead get a blank page, indicating to me that they require scripts to be on to receive a text document. I immediately as a rule close them. If you need to see where my cursor is or whatever just for me to read what you have to say I'm not interested in reading what you have written.