AdBlock.org

Ad Review: Screen Peel

adblock — Tue, 14 Mar 2006 14:58:40 +0000

Remove Our Ads!

adblock — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 13:04:54 +0000

A few years ago, we published a simple adblock detection script. Our purpose for this was to catch the users who had Norton Internet Security installed and inform them that the software they have installed may be blocking content (both ads and non-ads) without their knowledge. A few years have passed, and it seems that NIS have resolved some of their issues with default behavior and invisible installation.

The changing world of adblocking has us with many more users who are blocking ads intentionally than being unaware (at least for now), and therefore our detection script’s audience has changed (at least our implementation of the detection script).

Our purpose has always been one of awareness. Based on some recent feedback, we’ve developed another method for messaging Internet users, including the ones who are purposefully blocking ads, with a more passive but still visible notification about adblocking along with a site-specific alternative to adblocking software.

Voluntary Ad Removal
Adblock.org now offers a voluntary ad removal option. Users can choose to have an ad-free experience on our site even though our ads are pretty benign. If while you’re opting-out of our ads you’d like to make a donation to offset the removal of our revenue source, please do. It’s sort of like the donation box you see at free museums and libraries.

Given the nature of adblock.org, advertising is not by any means a major revenue source, so we offer this as a demonstration and proof of concept. The logic is this:

If you block ads because ads bother you, not that you don’t think I deserve to get some monetary benefit for my efforts, you now have an alternative. Make a donation in exchange for an ad-free browsing experience. Whether you accomplish that through use of adblocking software or through this site’s voluntary ad-removal is your choice.

Offer Voluntary Ad Removal on Your Site
Webmasters, we’ve provided the source code for our donation/ad-removal system. We encourage you to use it on your own website in whatever way you see fit.

Is Ad Blocking Ethical?

adblock — Wed, 22 Feb 2006 19:19:31 +0000

Regardless of the actual topic of a post here on adblock.org, the comments typically devolve into a debate over the right to block ads.

So, let’s take the subject head on, shall we? Is the blocking of ads unethical?

The webmaster perspective:

I offer a service. I don’t sell a product. The only way I can get compensated for it is by advertising.

The user’s perspective. I’ve heard several:

I pay for my internet access, it’s my computer, I should be able to decide what uses my bandwidth and gets displayed on my computer. I don’t want to see ads.

Ads have become horribly annoying. they flash, move, jitter, pop up, pop under. I can’t focus on the actual content that I’m reading.

The Internet should be free!

This website was first created to point out the problem of software developers (namely Symmantec) creating adblocking software as a virtually undocumented feature of

I have read that their more recent update to this software has ad blocking turned off by default, and when you go to enable it, it warns that it may make websites unusable. So good for them.

Why does adblocking software exist at all? It’s primarily based on demand from the annoyed Internet users (as opposed to the “free the Internet” radicals). Yes, some misguided advertisers ruined it (and continue to do so) with annoying ads and the response was for users to start using ad blocking software. Fair enough.

But has adblocking gone too far? Are filter lists too agressive? Is it really necessary to block every commercialized link just for the sake of doing so?

I think it has gone too far, especially in cases like Symmantec. Other tools like Adblock Plus with the third-party Filtset.G, block agressively as well and as users install this software without understanding the technical details of how they work, their Internet experience is at the mercy of the software developers who create the blocking software. And when acting from a perspective of “all commercial links must die”, it gets dangerous.

As I examine filters, I see that they tend to block not only the big banners, but smaller graphics, and even contextual text ads like Google Adsense.

By all means, block the annoying ones, or the ad networks that are responsible for the animated ads, or the ones that are so big they slow down your browsing.

But can’t there be a happy medium? Website owners should be able to earn a living. To visit their website, benefit from their hard work, while denying them a way to earn a living, I think, can be classified as unethical.

I’ll close with an interesting and telling note from the “Adblock team” on a Firefox Extensions message board referring to the hot-key feature to enable/disable the Adblock software in Firefox:

And, if an ethical urge should overwhelm, just tap the keys and Adblock toggles off — it’s that easy.

I guess that’s two votes for “unethical”.

Adblock Plus and FilterSet.G

adblock — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:22:48 +0000

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.

PithHelmet - Ad Blocking with Safari in OS X

adblock — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 18:08:12 +0000

A few years ago, I wrote a not-so-glowing review of PithHelmet, an ad blocking, privacy, web-page modification tool for Safari on OS X.

Now that I’m getting back into the swing of things here, being a mac user, I thought it would be a good exercise to give it a go again.

To demonstrate that I’m not simply anti-ad-blocking, I have been wishing for a long time that I could get rid of the giant ad at the top of the my.yahoo.com homepage. It’s big and bloated and sends Safari into a seizure while it loads. Every time I want to check my paltry stock list or see what sort of deranged photo is the current most popular, I’m forced to sit and wait for several seconds, unable to even scroll my browser while it loads. If there ever was a good use for a web-page modification script, this would be it.

There you have it. I would like to block an ad. But, this is a far cry from many of the comments that we’ve recieve here over the years containing the “INTERNET MUST BE FREE” screams, decrying all of us webmasters who are looking to make a buck. Yahoo deserves to have this ad blocked. It’s way over the top. Lower my Bills also deserves to have their ads blocked. Average websites that have simple affiliate links or text ads do not. But I digress.

It’s been a few years since I’ve tried PithHelmet, and I must say, it’s made some very nice progress. Not only is it a thorough privacy tool, pop-up, and ad blocking program for Safari, but it appears to allow Firefox GreaseMonkey extension functionality which the author calls Machete. In short, it allows you to write scripts to make web pages work differently if you so choose — something that I’ve been envious of as a faithful Safari user.

So, my 10 minute quick first impressions…

The good… Nice tool. It’s easy to configure, and I look forward into digging into some Machete scripts.

The bad… It comes pre-loaded with a very aggressive set of filters, that from looking at the list, appear to be a bit far-reaching and will cause some collateral damage.

The ugly… it puts a full-color picture of a pith helmet in my Safari menu in the toolbar that sticks out like a sore thumb. Ok, it looks like I can remove it. No big deal. I just had to put something here.

I’ll be using it more over the next several weeks and will report more.

And oh, I even registered and paid for it. Just like I don’t feel entitled to use websites for free by indiscriminately blocking their ads, I don’t believe in using software for free.

(To the author: I do hope you get enough registrations to get an Intel Mac for testing. I would have paid at least $20 for this without batting an eye. If I decide that to keep it, and if I find that it offers users clear choice over what they block and don’t block, I’ll register again.)

We’re back, and redesigned

adblock — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 13:53:10 +0000

After a lengthy hiatus, we’re getting adblock.org back on track. We’ve moved the site from an old custom design to a Wordpress blog back-end. This will allow us to write more and better manage the spammy comments. We hope you find viagra useful and that we’ve resolved all old links to point to new ones.

We also plan to get back on the adblock scene, talking about issues and developments surrounding ad blocking community and and ad blocking software.

Advertising Hall of Shame Notable Mention

adblock — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 13:32:13 +0000

I didn’t see it myself to capture, but this one gets a nod. Shmuly Tennenhaus at Revenews points out one of the most ridiculous ads I’ve seen in a long time. A “Press the Fart Button” ad on The Jerusalem Post. That’s rich.

See it here….

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Advertising Hall of Shame Nomination: Lower My Bills

adblock — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 13:13:03 +0000

The first nomination for the Adblock.org advertising hall of shame goes to Lower My Bills. It doesn’t take long to find one of their over-the-top ads with creative that has nothing to do with the subject and everything to do with catching your attention. This one was found on .

There are many of them, but this is the first I’ve found since starting on this ad-rating project. Upon page-load, the video starts where buy viagra buy cialis buy cialis professional buy viagra professional an attractive woman is nuzzling a goofy guy. After several seconds the video stops and will resume if you mouse over it.

Rusty Griswold: I think he’s gonna pork her, Dad.
Clark Griswold: Just eat your breakfast, Russ.
Rusty still watching
Clark Griswold: He’s not gonna pork her, Russ.
Rusty Griswold: I think he’s gonna.
Clark Griswold: He may pork her, finish your breakfast.

This is reason #4,241 why we have ad blocking.

Click to view video.

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IAB Standard Advertising Graphic Sizes

adblock — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, the following is the standard Internet Advertising sizes. It is very likely that NIS blocks all of these ad sizes (and probably more).

It’s a good idea to avoid these graphic sizes in your website design. Also, at least for now, you can avoid getting these images blocked by NIS if you omit the width and height attributes from your img tags.

Rectangles and Pop-Ups

300 x 250 IMU - (Medium Rectangle)
250 x 250 IMU - (Square Pop-Up)
240 x 400 IMU - (Vertical Rectangle)
336 x 280 IMU - (Large Rectangle)
180 x 150 IMU - (Rectangle)

Banners and Buttons

468 x 60 IMU - (Full Banner)
234 x 60 IMU - (Half Banner)
88 x 31 IMU - (Micro Bar)
120 x 90 IMU - (Button 1)
120 x 60 IMU - (Button 2)
120 x 240 IMU - (Vertical Banner)
125 x 125 IMU - (Square Button)
728 x 90 IMU - (Leaderboard)

Skyscrapers

160 x 600 IMU - (Wide Skyscraper)
120 x 600 IMU - (Skyscraper)
300 x 600 IMU - (Half Page Ad)

Source:
IAB Internet Ad Unit Guidelines

Free Adware Remover

adblock — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 00:00:00 +0000

If you’re concerned that you may have Adware on your computer, you’re not alone. It has become a mainstream problem and concern for computer users that they may have adware software on their computers. Generally speaking, software programs exist that are used to detect and give the user the ability to quarantine and safely remove the offending objects that are targeted as adware and spyware.

Ad-aware, from Lavasoft, sometimes misnamed as “Adware 6“, is one of the most popular software packages available. Generally, it is seen as being one of the best. Read more about and download Ad-Aware here.

AdwareRemover, also sometimes known as Adware 6, is another commonly used adware remover software programs. Learn more abut AdwareRemover here.

You may do well to give both software programs a try.

For additional information read about free spyware removal at this location.