Anti-Adblock Killer extension prevents sites from blocking your ad-blocker

No, you are missing the point. If your site hosts obnoxious ads and malicious ads (malware), then you deserve to go out of business. I have no problem with ads. My dad sold televisions ads when I was growing up and is a TV station manager today. Television has long had regulations that stop them from running dishonest or harmful ads. The internet does not. Television has to deal with its own "adblocker" in the form of DVRs and has to work around that to stay profitable.

I'll guess we'll agree to disagree.
 
Well to tell you the truth, the biggest win for my team will be when the adblockers will die. I'm already in the process of implementing a solution from a anti-adblock company.

They won't. Ultimately, you will lose this; you may be able to force the users to download the ads and run the scripts to see the content, but you can't make their browser actually show the ads that have been downloaded.

Even then, it would require significant work, as most sites don't just have ONE ad-serving or tracking script, but bunches of them, and each one would have to have some kind of check-in enabled to make sure the script has run. It would also require the ad scripts (residing on third-party servers) to be called and validated before the content is served, which means the page will appear to load very slowly even for non adblock users. The page would be easily breakable, with any slowness or failure to respond on the part of the ad server triggering the adblock wall, annoying your users greatly (again, including the non-adblock ones).

The content providers have allowed this ad-serving stuff to get way out of hand. This page, for example, currently makes 72 connection requests just to serve the content we see here, and many are worse! That makes the page use a great deal of browser memory, and requires way more processing time than a simple web article page should really require.

If I want to see full, non-phone-ized web pages on my Android tablet, I have to set the useragent to desktop, but then the damn thing loads so many scripts and other extraneous junk that my poky but otherwise usable tablet almost grinds to a halt (talking in general here, not the current site). Isn't it a bit much?

The advertisers have invited the adblocking by making their ads so obnoxious that people sought a solution. I always liked the ads in car or computer magazines; I WANT to see what people offer and for how much for things I am interested in. Those ads are not targeted beyond placement in a certain publication, yet they are far better than what we see on the web now. I've even opted in for the daily special ads from some online vendors (sent via email), and I like perusing them to see if there are any deals for me. If web ads were like that, I might not want to block them, but most of the time, they're so far out of relevance that it's just obnoxious, like the Youtube ad for Airbus or Boeing. Yeah... can't say I am really in the market for a 60 million dollar plus aircraft.

The real winner in this may be the advertiser. The website operator may get paid by serving the ad as many times as possible, but the advertiser only gets paid in sales. Serving ads to people who are never going to buy a product advertised is a waste of the ad money. By not serving the ads to people that are so annoyed by them that they would go through the trouble of installing an adblocker, the advertiser avoids wasting that money.
 
I don't block ads - I block tracking cookies. Even that is enough to cause some web sites to tell me I have to disable my "ad blocker" in order to view their content.
 
actually the users will lose, since they will not be ble to receive free content and will have to pay for it.
Exactly. Ad blocking can only defeat itself, never win. It will either become useless, because of technological measures that counter it, or because all ad-supported sites will go out of business or switch to a subscription model. In either case ad blocking will become pointless, and ultimately users will have to pay a higher price for content than what they had prior to the rise of ad blockers.
 
Exactly. Ad blocking can only defeat itself, never win. It will either become useless, because of technological measures that counter it, or because all ad-supported sites will go out of business or switch to a subscription model. In either case ad blocking will become pointless, and ultimately users will have to pay a higher price for content than what they had prior to the rise of ad blockers.
There are no "technical measures" that can defeat it though other than 1. Anti-block Scripts (which can be ironically be blocked before they run, which won't change due to obvious anti-Malware reasons), or 2. Server side detection of non-loading of ads (which can be thwarted by pretending to load the ads but simply hiding the elements).

As for the economic situation as a whole, we've only got this problem because the advertising industry is like a small obese child with zero sense of self-awareness or self-control that simply doesn't know when to stop:-

- When we had 2-3x 2-3 min ad breaks (4-9mins per hour) on TV people watched them. When that grew to 3x 5-8 minutes (15-24mins per hour), people now skip them all.

- When web ads were unobtrusive, and self-hosted no-one blocked them. Then came animated GIF's, ads with sound, flash video ads, pop-ups, pop-unders, click-jacking, the "need" for 20 scripts just to show an image file, etc. Now you're looking at up to 80% of a web-site's bandwidth going on ads, social trackers, etc, and as little as 20% content. That's the equivalent of a 12min TV programme being padded to 1 hour with 48mins of ads.

- When our local cinema showed 3-4 trailers, we watched them. Now they expect us to sit through 45mins of ads & trailers, we don't bother going.

- When DVD's came with optional 1-3 trailers, we skipped the ones we definitely didn't want but watched the occasional one that looked interesting. But when that 1-3 became 3-6 and they started using PUOPS (Prohibited User Operations, ie, disable skip, FF, menu, etc, buttons), it became just another reason to build a HTPC which ignores PUOP's and jumps straight to the Title Menu, so now we watch zero. Same goes for those who rip everything to a NAS.

If they learned to use a smaller amount of ads, then those ads could each command a higher revenue. Instead, we've got an ineffective pile-it-high, sell-it-cheap, "wall of noise" which is actively driving people to undermine their entire unsustainable business model. Ad-blockers are simply the reaction to a larger problem, not the problem itself.
 
As for the economic situation as a whole, we've only got this problem because the advertising industry is like a small obese child with zero sense of self-awareness or self-control that simply doesn't know when to stop:
Very true.

The only reason I started using Ad-Block was because they have become so annoying. I didn't build my PC for it to become a billboard of **** I'm not interested in. I can ignore advertising as long as it is to one side or merged in with the pages. But that is not good enough for them, they want to be in your face and force your hand. And that is no good for me, I will not be harassed while using my own machine.
 
Most interesting and full of fallacious assumptions.
First, you should try to access http://forbes.com/ as it objects to having its ads blocked, so this become a nice testbed for the issue.

Second, it's not true that ad blocking is only achieved using some add-on which can then be manipulated.
I have never used any ad blocking add-on in any browser, but Forbes still objects as if I did :giggle:

This discloses that Forbes is looking for a cookie to be set when the page is loaded from the host and the javascript can then whine about blocking because it is missing.

Blocking is easily achieve by controlling the etc\hosts file and THAT can't be manipulated.
 
Publishers (including myself) are losing tons of money because of adblockers, so this war is inevitable.
If the ads weren't so obnoxious a lot of people wouldn't use adblockers. The internet is a massive rolling example of why consumers use adblockers. I'm all for having a revenue model for content but there has to be balance. You choose you revenue model that annoys the consumers - consumers are fighting back. They have a say. They pay your bills. You don't get free reign to do whatever you want. You think you do but if no-one buys your content, well that worked well for you then didn't it?
 
Well, we're not arguing here about beliefs. I, at least, have presented you facts, not beliefs.


You were the first to say they were. What I said was that it's the violation of the DMCA to circumvent the anti ad blocker, which explicitly forbids such actions.


Now you are making no sense.


Again, nobody's talking here about malware, except you. The talk is here about anti ad blocking, and the circumvention of that, which is prohibited by the DMCA.
Good luck with that.
 
The talk is here about anti ad blocking, and the circumvention of that, which is prohibited by the DMCA.
Perhaps, but using the etc\host method blocks access to domains, not ads per se and therefore is quite a different animal. ALL content on the domain (or sub.domain.name) gets "unable to connect to remote host"
 
If the ads weren't so obnoxious a lot of people wouldn't use adblockers. The internet is a massive rolling example of why consumers use adblockers. I'm all for having a revenue model for content but there has to be balance. You choose you revenue model that annoys the consumers - consumers are fighting back. They have a say. They pay your bills.
You're having it all backwards. First: ad blockers are the ones that force publishers to push out more and more obnoxious ads. After all, they have to compensate somehow for the revenue lost because of ad blockers. The more people block ads, the more obnoxious the ads have to generate the same amount of money and cover the same operating costs.

Also, ad blockers are consumers, but not customers. And consumers have no say, because they don't pay the publishers bills. That's the point made here, that went wooooosh over your head. Someone who blocks ads is no a customer, and is not welcome anywhere. That's the exact reason why publishers are starting to block ad blockers everywhere.

You don't get free reign to do whatever you want.
Exactly. That's why ad blockers are getting their asses kicked out everywhere. If you don't care about the people who are working hard to produce content and provide services to you free of charge, and are actively denying them the ability to cover their costs by displaying ads on their sites, then you can pay up in cash or GTF off their lawn.
 
Someone who blocks ads is no a customer, and is not welcome anywhere.
All they have to do is tell me I'm not welcome and I will happily stay away. I can't pay every site on the internet and I'm not gonna let them (any of them) harass me, while I use my own PC either. I have absolutely no sympathy for anyone that tries to make a living through advertising.
 
Also, ad blockers are consumers, but not customers. And consumers have no say, because they don't pay the publishers bills. That's the point made here, that went wooooosh over your head. Someone who blocks ads is no a customer, and is not welcome anywhere. That's the exact reason why publishers are starting to block ad blockers everywhere.

Exactly. That's why ad blockers are getting their asses kicked out everywhere. If you don't care about the people who are working hard to produce content and provide services to you free of charge, and are actively denying them the ability to cover their costs by displaying ads on their sites, then you can pay up in cash or GTF off their lawn.
You think people are going to have a problem finding sites that don't post obnoxious ads? I can play that game. There is literally no website that would block me for blocking their ads that I would possibly care about. Literally none. Because there are so many alternatives. And there are *plenty* of other people like me.

Content providers and ad providers brought this economy on themselves. I ain't crying if your website dies. I installed an adblocker after your crazy ads. NOT before.
 
You think people are going to have a problem finding sites that don't post obnoxious ads? I can play that game. There is literally no website that would block me for blocking their ads that I would possibly care about. Literally none. Because there are so many alternatives. And there are *plenty* of other people like me.
You don't get it, do you? No web site is immune against the laws of economy, and no web site can keep operating at a loss forever. So if ad blocking persists, then not only the sites you're currently visiting, but every other site you might switch to will either have to start blocking ad blockers, change to a subscription model, or simply go out of business if it can't do neither. So, in the end you'll have nowhere to go with your ad blocker - either because you will be banned from all the other sites, too, or because there will be no other sites left. And the more people like you are out there, the sooner this will happen, and the less sites will be left.

Content providers and ad providers brought this economy on themselves. I ain't crying if your website dies. I installed an adblocker after your crazy ads. NOT before.
Which doesn't change the fact that by doing so you forced the publishers to display even more "crazy ads", because they now have to make up for the loss that's caused by you, too. You're not really good even just at basic logic, are you?
 
You don't get it, do you? No web site is immune against the laws of economy, and no web site can keep operating at a loss forever. So if ad blocking persists, then not only the sites you're currently visiting, but every other site you might switch to will either have to start blocking ad blockers, change to a subscription model, or simply go out of business if it can't do neither. So, in the end you'll have nowhere to go with your ad blocker - either because you will be banned from all the other sites, too, or because there will be no other sites left. And the more people like you are out there, the sooner this will happen, and the less sites will be left.


Which doesn't change the fact that by doing so you forced the publishers to display even more "crazy ads", because they now have to make up for the loss that's caused by you, too. You're not really good even just at basic logic, are you?
That would make sense if the number of websites serving content were going down. So any facts to back your claim? How's your basic logic? Guess everyone is in the business of losing money nowadays?
 
Over your head.

And yes, the number of publications that serve high-quality original content is rapidly winding down. If ad blocking keeps growing, there will be even less of them. And those still being around will serve even worse content.

No free lunch. You get what you pay (or at least don't block) for. There's no getting around that. You not comprehending that is just your failure, but doesn't change the facts.
 
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OH GUYS - - all the views are clearly stated, do we need to constantly throw sand at each other? Time to find another hobby for your past time. SHEEZ!
 
So are you still successfully reading Wired articles with your adblocker enabled?

I am unable to read Wired articles even though I have no adblocker. I use Ghostery to block tracking cookies and that is all it takes to stop me from seeing content at Wired, Forbes, and a few other sites. I understand and am sympathetic to the needs of web sites to generate revenues from ads - hence no adblocker. However, I am unwilling to sacrifice my privacy - hence blocking tracking cookies.

Both I and the sites like Wired and Forbes lose in cases like that: me because I don't get to read the articles on those web sites; them because if I can't get in to read the articles I can't see the ads either. In other words, Wired and Forbes are doing a very good job of stopping me from seeing their ads. And if those ads were for things like tools, computers, and computer components they would have had a good chance of getting me to provide those revenue generating ad clicks.
 
I am unable to read Wired articles even though I have no adblocker.

What you might consider is, when you want to see one of the articles from Wired or WSJ, I copy the link and paste it into a browser in incognito, inPrivate, or Private Browsing mode. This way none of the cookies are saved on your computer, they get to show their ads, and your privacy is retained.
 
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