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Does anyone have a good list of sites to block? I know that, on the face of it, sounds dumb, but there's some that annoy _everyone_. experts-exchange was the

Does anyone have a good list of sites to block? I know that, on the face of it, sounds dumb, but there's some that annoy _everyone_. experts-exchange was the first site I've blocked, for example. Anyone have a list of those annoying sites that pop up when you're trying to search for some obscure error message etc? I'd love to be a bit proactive.

dredmorbius 15y ago
experts-exchange gets my vote as well. I hate hate hate the thought of having to do all my Google searches logged in though.
pigbucket 15y ago
dsl put one up when the chrome extension block was released: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218528 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218528
- muppetman 15y ago
  Exactly what I was looking for, thank you.
shawnee_ 15y ago
Yelp. The only site I block, as of about a week ago: http://bit.ly/odVtMg http://bit.ly/odVtMg Background: Had an account since April 2007, had reviews removed, last month had my account deleted without notice or warning. I emailed asking for a reason, but have heard nothing. Yelp uses its "rank" in Google, Yahoo, et. al to bribe and extort small businesses, to prevent facts from being public knowledge, and to censor citizen reporting. If a small business doesn't have its own website, Yelp is usually the first thing that pops up in a search; it knows this and milks it for everything it can.
laughinghan 15y ago
w3schools.com Why? See http://w3fools.com http://w3fools.com
- nl 15y ago
  w3fools is one of those stupid sites that exists sorely as a protest against the existence of another site. It's written by the kind of people who used to recommend "validating" your HTML because then it would be valid. Yay! The pedantry against w3schools is unhelpful, misguided and at times down-right wrong. For example: w3schools: "URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign." w3fools: "That's not true. An URL can use spaces. Nothing defines that a space is replaced with a + sign" Actually: "The encoding used by default is based on a very early version of the general URI percent-encoding rules, with a number of modifications such as newline normalization and replacing spaces with "+" instead of "%20". The MIME type of data encoded this way is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and it is currently defined (still in a very outdated manner) in the HTML and XForms specifications. In addition, the CGI specification contains rules for how web servers decode data of this type and make it available to applications." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#The_application.2Fx-www-form-urlencoded_type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#The_applicatio... Many (most) of these things are judgement calls and/or historical anomalies. W3Fools is wrong to say w3schools is a problem - it is merely insufficient on its own. They would be better off generating a better version rather than complaining.
  - misuse-permit 15y ago
    But w3fools looks pretty, so it must be right.
  - laughinghan 15y ago
    While I agree that the W3Fools list of mistakes on the W3Schools site is heavily diluted with nitpicks, I think W3Fools makes a valid point that W3Schools is inaccurate and out-of-date to the point of being misleading, because in my personal experience there have been more than one instance in which case something I had "learned" on W3Schools before I knew better lead to mistakes I didn't realize until I started regularly consulting other sites instead. I also don't see what you mean that it's a "stupid site that exists sorely [sic] as a protest against the existence of another site". If a hypothetical site did exist that was as bad as W3Fools claims W3Schools is (setting aside that you don't seem to think W3Schools is that bad), don't you think it's nice, or at least not stupid, to have a site you can point people to that explains what's wrong with the hypothetical bad site and what alternatives there are? Validating your HTML is like linting your JS, I agree that it'd be dumb to do it for it's own sake, and in fact I know HTML and JS well enough and have enough quirky personal preferences that I don't do it, but I believe it is in fact good practice, especially for beginners, because invalid HTML, like JS that doesn't pass lint, can be a sign of bad practices or mistakes.
mattgreenrocks 15y ago
bigresource.com - copies content from elsewhere and injects ads daniweb.com - terrible quality discussion ehow.com - for when you want a step above Yahoo Answers
glassx 15y ago
What I did: go to Stack Overflow, pick the most popular question of the month and search on Google. Lots of 'mirrors' will appear (probably not on the first page) and you can use your judgement.

dredmorbius 15y ago

experts-exchange gets my vote as well. I hate hate hate the thought of having to do all my Google searches logged in though.

pigbucket 15y ago

dsl put one up when the chrome extension block was released: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218528 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218528

muppetman 15y ago
Exactly what I was looking for, thank you.

shawnee_ 15y ago

Yelp. The only site I block, as of about a week ago: http://bit.ly/odVtMg http://bit.ly/odVtMg Background: Had an account since April 2007, had reviews removed, last month had my account deleted without notice or warning. I emailed asking for a reason, but have heard nothing. Yelp uses its "rank" in Google, Yahoo, et. al to bribe and extort small businesses, to prevent facts from being public knowledge, and to censor citizen reporting. If a small business doesn't have its own website, Yelp is usually the first thing that pops up in a search; it knows this and milks it for everything it can.

laughinghan 15y ago

w3schools.com Why? See http://w3fools.com http://w3fools.com

nl 15y ago
w3fools is one of those stupid sites that exists sorely as a protest against the existence of another site. It's written by the kind of people who used to recommend "validating" your HTML because then it would be valid. Yay! The pedantry against w3schools is unhelpful, misguided and at times down-right wrong. For example: w3schools: "URLs cannot contain spaces. URL encoding normally replaces a space with a + sign." w3fools: "That's not true. An URL can use spaces. Nothing defines that a space is replaced with a + sign" Actually: "The encoding used by default is based on a very early version of the general URI percent-encoding rules, with a number of modifications such as newline normalization and replacing spaces with "+" instead of "%20". The MIME type of data encoded this way is application/x-www-form-urlencoded, and it is currently defined (still in a very outdated manner) in the HTML and XForms specifications. In addition, the CGI specification contains rules for how web servers decode data of this type and make it available to applications." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#The_application.2Fx-www-form-urlencoded_type http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding#The_applicatio... Many (most) of these things are judgement calls and/or historical anomalies. W3Fools is wrong to say w3schools is a problem - it is merely insufficient on its own. They would be better off generating a better version rather than complaining.
- misuse-permit 15y ago
  But w3fools looks pretty, so it must be right.
- laughinghan 15y ago
  While I agree that the W3Fools list of mistakes on the W3Schools site is heavily diluted with nitpicks, I think W3Fools makes a valid point that W3Schools is inaccurate and out-of-date to the point of being misleading, because in my personal experience there have been more than one instance in which case something I had "learned" on W3Schools before I knew better lead to mistakes I didn't realize until I started regularly consulting other sites instead. I also don't see what you mean that it's a "stupid site that exists sorely [sic] as a protest against the existence of another site". If a hypothetical site did exist that was as bad as W3Fools claims W3Schools is (setting aside that you don't seem to think W3Schools is that bad), don't you think it's nice, or at least not stupid, to have a site you can point people to that explains what's wrong with the hypothetical bad site and what alternatives there are? Validating your HTML is like linting your JS, I agree that it'd be dumb to do it for it's own sake, and in fact I know HTML and JS well enough and have enough quirky personal preferences that I don't do it, but I believe it is in fact good practice, especially for beginners, because invalid HTML, like JS that doesn't pass lint, can be a sign of bad practices or mistakes.

mattgreenrocks 15y ago

bigresource.com - copies content from elsewhere and injects ads daniweb.com - terrible quality discussion ehow.com - for when you want a step above Yahoo Answers

glassx 15y ago

What I did: go to Stack Overflow, pick the most popular question of the month and search on Google. Lots of 'mirrors' will appear (probably not on the first page) and you can use your judgement.