Adblock Plus and FilterSet.G
A number of commenters here at Adblock.org have recommended that I take a look at Adblock Plus, a replacement to the long-time adblocking Firefox extension, Adblock. Many users of this Adblock extension recommend the use of the FilterSet.G blocking list.
I took a look to see how it works and from a Website owner and advertiser perspective, and how well it allows the user to control their adblocking.
How it works
When it first loads, it reads in the filter list that the user has configured. This list is created either by the user on-the-fly as they use the plug-in and instruct it to block certain domains or more advanced pattern matching on URLs that feed blockable objects.
For every webpage that you view, it scans through all of the elements in the Document Object Model for a given page, looking for things to block. It targets, primarily, types of elements that can be used to include content in a page, namely javascript, images, stylesheets, and objects. I like that it doesn’t seem to target plain text links, which as we’ve seen from other adblocking software packages can butcher a page.
For any given page, you can examine all of the page elements that are eligible for blocking through a sidebar that can be shown by clicking on the adblock toolbutton. You can specify specific URLs to block, or create more general wildcard rules. You can also specify “whitelisted” entries which will have the reverse effect and prevent an element from being blocked by a perhaps over-generalized rule.
For each of these blockable objects, it matches the source url with a list of wildcard matches and regular expressions, the filter list. If it finds a match, it uses the object’s properties to not display it on the page. The basic Adblock Plus installation comes empty, ready for the user to start setting the blocking rules.
Pre-made Filter Sets
Pre-set lists of adblocking filters is what makes us most nervous. We’ve seen previously that some adblocking software have taken careless and reckless approaches to pre-set filters.
An Adblock and Adblock Plus filterset is available for download, called FilterSet.G, that has a large set of regular expressions and domains which are intended to be a thorough set of adblocking rules.
From the Filterset.G installation document, the authors spell out their goals, which are nice to see. If they don’t care about website owners, they at least care about the user experience.
The guiding principle behind this filterset is efficiency. Conservative domain blocking, careful use of Regular Expressions, and a strict stance against false positives help to avoid the problems faced by other filtersets, from overspecificity to overgeneralization.
Enjoy.
Further, they have a Whitelist filterset that they indicate is required for Adblock Plus users to prevent false-positives.
Filterset.G-Whitelist-Beta requires Adblock Plus (http://bene.sitesled.com/adblock.htm) and is essential for the proper operation of Filterset.G in conjunction with it.
Filterset.G-Whitelist-Beta stacks on top of Filterset.G to eliminate false positives resulting from Filterset.G that cannot be fixed without a whitelist. In addition, Adblock Plus’ div-blocking feature results in major false positives on many sites when Filterset.G is used, and Filterset.G-Whitelist-Beta corrects them.
If you use the FilterSet.G updater plugin, it will keep your Filter Set updated, and can optionally keep your Whitelist updated as well. Again, the latter is recommended to prevent over-blocking of content.
In summary, I’m encouraged by the ease of use and configurability of this adblocking plugin. Definitely a long way from the hidden and gross default behavior of tools like Norton Internet Security. I’ll be taking a closer look at the filter set to evaluate whether I think the authors have met their goals of “Conservative domain blocking, careful use of Regular Expressions, and a strict stance against false positives”. They do appear to feel some responsibility and dedication to making the ruleset as high a quality as possible through taking feedback from their users in a forum.
February 18th, 2006 at 11:47 am
G’s filterset is definitely the best. In the last seven months of using it, I’ve had -two- false positives. In conjuction with the CustomizeGoogle plugin, I don’t see any sponsored links in Google, including Gmail, I see no banners, no popups, no annoying flash, and I’ve noticed a definite increase in pageloads, even on my 5MB cable connection.
It really is an awesome feeling - it’s not just an algorithm to detect ads, or anything clunky like that - it literally blocks them at the domain level. How cool is that? I rarely-to-never have to get updated definitions, I just block all adservers.
Adblock is -the- reason I use Firefox.
February 18th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
Filterset.G is crap. Nearly no updates in the last months; it is slow and has too much regex… its simply an overkill. But on the horizon there is growing an new filterset: fast and effective. But growing needs time, so be patient! The unknown.
February 20th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
Adblock Plus and the Filterset.G are two very unethical products.
February 21st, 2006 at 9:02 am
Unethical? Actually, it’s not. It’s keeping control in the hands of the owners of the respective computers, and allows them to control their privacy and bandwidth.
… or are you just mad that people are fighting back against advertising they hate? Seems to me THAT is unethical - the advertising industry has been operating on the idea that “Sure, people hate us, but there’s really nothing they can do about it, so let’s find some new way to annoy them!”. Now, once we have the ability to control our experiences, they’re screaming bloody murder.
Sorry, but it’s not the customer’s responsibility to look at adver-crap. There’s no contract, express or implied, that says I have to. Advertising on your site is your perrogative as much as blocking what I don’t want to see is mine.
Oh, and “The Unknown”, I think your problem “exists between the keyboard and the chair”. You probably turned off automatic updates or something, because my G revision date says Feb 3 - that isn’t terribly unreasonable!
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:11 am
“Adblock Plus and the Filterset.G are two very unethical products.”
Yeah, and so is TIVO/VCRS (people can skip commericials!), and come to think of it, maybe people who throw away junk mail without opening it first are sinners too. Someoen paid to have that junk mail made after all.
Sheez!
February 22nd, 2006 at 8:36 am
Comparing Adblock with skipping TV commercials and throwing away junk mail isn’t valid.
Keep in mind the difference between the website owner (or television network) and the advertiser.
If you fast-forward through a commercial, you’re affecting the advertiser. The TV network already got their money as the advertiser has paid for the placement.
If you block Internet ads, you’re harming only the website owner who is presumably and hopefully providing you a valuable service. Typically, on the Internet, advertising is paid per view of an ad or some action that happens on an ad that has been displayed (a click, or on performance). If an ad is blocked, none of those events can occur, and the website owner is missing out.
Not only are you hurting the website owner, you’re helping the advertisers, by removing yourself as someone who otherwise ignores ads, from the mix. So if you feel the need to justify your actions, consider that you’re helping out the big corporations who would otherwise be wasting their money on poor website owners who are trying to get something for their efforts.
As far as junk mail goes, you’ve done nothing but have a mail address, so you’re not getting a service that’s funded by advertising. If the advertiser has paid postage, and you throw it away because they sent it to someone who doesn’t respond to direct mail, then they get what they deserve.
February 26th, 2006 at 3:30 pm
As a website owner I don’t implement ads on my page(s) and - as a surfer - I’m using AdBlock Plus and Filterset.G.
Well, my webspace isn’t very expensiv (US-$ 65 per year for 1 GB space, 50 GB traffic/month, PHP, 10x MySQL, etc.) and I’m not relying on it as a source of income. But most website owners don’t rely on such an income, mostly firms do - by offering a service to users, for example chats.
If they won’t be able to finance themselves with ads they should and would sell their service or offer a paid premium-service without ads and some other features to cross-finance their free and paid services.
TV stations get their money, right. But the advertisers calculate with the increasing number of ad-skippers, too. Insofar they pay less for a specific time.
With todays low costs for webspace and traffic nobody should rely on ad-income, if he/she creates a private website, blog, board or whatever.
When looking on some private websites - without adblocking - I sometimes get nauseous. Adframe left, adframe right, adframe above, banner and overlay-ad in center frame and less than 30 % of the browser window filled with the content.
To avoid that I turn on Adblock and Filterset.G. If I block ads on websites that deserve the ad-income, well, sorry, but that’s collateral damage and I’m not willing constantly deactivating and activating Adblock.
Website owner have -usually- the ability to control whether a surfer blocks ads or not, he/she could exclude me from “stealing” bandwith. If he/she isn’t willing to exclude all adblocking users he/she should cross-finance his/her project.
Anyone here who bought something after seeing it on a ad on the web? And do you bought it at the advertisers shop?
April 18th, 2006 at 1:25 pm
Now you should test adblock plus again. Now different filtersets are available.
June 3rd, 2006 at 11:58 am
as the users of Adblocking software are not in them selfs likely to click ads, and most ad services such as google adsence work on a pay per click system, i do not think that this sort of software will harm websites to an excessive level.
July 26th, 2006 at 5:27 am
If adblock plus was “ethical” it would id its self to websites. Then its upto that website to block or let that user in.
If the only argument is that it saves the users bandwidth from downloading adverts and makes it quicker then bugger off and find another website.
Most advertising other than google is display based rather than click based, so by not loading in the image you are hurting these companies you seem so keen to use.
August 23rd, 2006 at 1:54 pm
So it is ethical to bombard me ads… but using a product to eliminate these ads is somehow unethical? Marketing and Advertising has now gotten to a point in the world where people are required to live with it? And in one of places where it is possible to remove the annoying and needless crap from our lives the consumer is somehow at fault? Wow. That is rich.
My guess is the fact that it is free is also very unethical.
September 28th, 2006 at 1:17 pm
g is a cool guy i got help from him when i made my own filterset.. i recommend all who despise adverts to use his filter, it’s well worth it.
September 28th, 2006 at 1:20 pm
also adblock plus .6 by mcm is very good, i still use it till this day.
October 12th, 2006 at 11:25 am
I use Filter Set G. Sometimes it goes several months without being updated, but a several month old filter set works almost as well as it did when it was created. And it works very well. i rarely see ads, and if there were any false positives, I just didn’t notice. The web is undeniably more beautiful with adblock and filter set g.
It is rediculous when people claim that not watching ads is stealing. Where do these people draw the line? Is it okay if I don’t look at billboards? What if I go to the bathroom during a commercial break? What if I don’t buy CLR? Is channel skipping okay? How ’bout taping songs from the radio?
If I don’t want to view ads, there is no reason I should. It is my browser, my computer, and I GET THE LAST SAY!
As for whatever the deal is between the website owner and their advertisers, that is between them. It ain’t none of my business.
October 27th, 2006 at 4:48 pm
Now its excellent, but i think one day people will find out how to create ads which cant be blocked (eg use all random names or sth similar).
If sth like this happens, adblock will be worth nothing
October 29th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
Adblock and filterset.* is perfectly ethical, and effective. I use them, and like them quite a bit. I am also a website owner.
If you run a website as a publicly open site where anyone can view all content, then there is no ethical line to be crossed if some of that content isnt consumed. If that content happens to be your ads all the better.
If that website is selling its own content as its primary product some gateway needs to erected to block the general public and enforce that. Just like I cant complain if I drop dollar bills and leaflets on the ground and people only pick up the dollar bills.
The New York Times and popular science are both mainstream websites that have learned this lesson. They keep premium content for a captive subscription audience. You dont want to do that? ou want to run adverts by the open public? Feel free, but dont get some sort of feeling of entitlement to it.
November 2nd, 2006 at 11:58 am
Antony Shen calls everything unethical. His pro advertisement propaganda machine (Sillydog) opposes Firefox, open source and anything that doesn’t run on Macs.
November 9th, 2006 at 7:24 pm
Look out for trolls, folks.
November 10th, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Blocking adverts is most certainly not unethical.
People have the right to view the web however they please, they are under no obligation to view certain parts of a website when they browse. Some websites exist purely because they make money from advertising and thats not because of some moral obligation on the users part, it’s because up until recently there were no reliable ways of blocking online content without also blocking legitimate content.
There are no laws against filtering out content from websites, there are no standards in place to stop users from doing so, and so users doing so cannot be breaking any standard, the users are not breaking any code of conduct or any understood or unwritten rules, there’s no moral or legal obligation to download adverts,
The single greatest reason people put up with adverts is because they do not know of any way to stop it, not because it’s unethical to block adverts.
There’s only one type of person worse than an advertiser in my opinion, and that’s the fools who click the adverts who are actually generating revenue for the people advertising, it’s the same as people who open spam and read it and actually fall for the scams. If these people didn’t exist then advertising and spamming would simply be unprofitable and would naturally cease.