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AdBlocking is not the same as covering up billboards. The ads actively get in the way of the web site - the entire site stalls until some database somewhere looks up my IP, reads my cookies and finally decides I want to know about saving elephants. The equivalent would be the billboard blocking the damn road.
No, the problem with ads is that they have gone from a) hmm, out on the side bar to b) stalling the web site to c) popping up covering content and hiding where the damn x button is.
If you want to advertise, fine. Just don't be an arse about it.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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Hear, hear! Charlie.
I'd add some additional coloration to the problem. Billboards certainly don't block the road. Yet, in many cases, adverts on sites do this routinely.
Also, a billboard doesn't ambush you five miles down the road, having secretly used an exploit to leave behind a fleet of spies and malware that car-jacks you, then forces your vehicle off the main highway and down some hillbilly dead-end road leading to a small town with in-breds running the police, jail and banks.
If the sites stopped selecting adverts that attempt to use these software and OS exploits and behaved with any modicum of decency and honesty, then people might just not need the #%$!#@ ad-blockers.
Until then, any site that demands I turn off ad-blocking software will never see me again.
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason; the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
--G.K. Chesterton
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I'm sure that all seems very noble in your head but if somebody's buying your ticket to get into the cinema/theatre/game do you then start complaining about the seats? Everyone of those advertisers is paying money to enable you to view websites for free. Just have a look through your browsing history for a day and imagine how much it would take out of your bank account at even a few pence/cents per page should advertising disappear.
It would do everybody a great deal of good if their first year on the Internet was limited to the 56k dial-up pay as you go that we oldies remember as the height of luxury. We might then see an end to this poisonous sense of entitlement of which ad blockers is just a symptom. People who don't realise that the extraordinary speed and convenience of modern internet connections is a privilege and not a right lack the gratitude necessary to preserve it. Ad blockers are the ultimate expression of the selfishness and philistinism of modern internet users. Me, me, me and now, now, now, are unhealthy mantras in any context. It would be tragic (though utterly typical of humanity) if they were to lead to the Internet becoming nothing more than a rich man's toy as the vast array of free services and information it offers disappear behind paywalls or simply cease to exist at all. Enduring the odd obtrusive ad is surely not too great price to pay to prevent that?
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Member 9082365 wrote: Ad blockers are the ultimate expression of the selfishness and philistinism of modern internet users.
I don't believe this. Quite the opposite, Ad Blockers are a consequence of the greed and intrusiveness of marketing agencies who insist on turning a website with some adverts to an advertising site with a little bit of content if you can find it.
There was never the need for Ad Blockers when adverts were restrained and unobtrusive like they are on CP.
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Member 9082365 wrote: Ad blockers are the ultimate expression of the selfishness and philistinism of modern internet users.
My initial, knee jerk reaction to this comment is --> cough, bullshit.
I will always use an ad blocker, unless my user experience on the site dictates otherwise. I will never click on an ad, ever, so why do I need to see them.
I will be faarrrkkkking legless before I am carriedcto the car ftombhere. - Michael Martin - Christmas 2015
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908 - I would only comment that in my original comment, I don't have an issue with ads. The problem is as others have stated. That said, there is a sort of free market contest going on - how can I advertise without driving away my customer base?
TV is still trying to figure out how to do it. We are witnessing the morphing of technology and discarding of what people don't want to pay for. The other night I caught up on my BBT. Of 30 minutes of show time, only 20 minutes was actually content. Thank God for the DVR. Yet even with the ubiquitous of DVRs, certain shows seem to make money.
It's not really a question of not wanting to pay for services received. It's more of don't annoy me while I'm doing it. 
Now, if Santa wanted to give me what I really want for Christmas, I want my local cell providers to be able to go head to head with Comcast. Comcast has a lock on shows and data right now, but all I can tell is people "tolerate" their garbage. Given the option to jump to a more flexible offering, people will leave in droves.
Charlie Gilley
<italic>Stuck in a dysfunctional matrix from which I must escape...
"Where liberty dwells, there is my country." B. Franklin, 1783
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
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I think you're reading more into this than there really is.
Nobody I've read so far is advocating (or as you put it, poisonously demanding via a sense of entitlement) that ad's completely disappear forever and we all bask in free everything. Don't get me started. Those advocating for free everything haven't quite graduated from school yet.
What we are pointing out, are the real Philistines -- the advertisers and their slimy ilk who are hijacking browsers, depositing tracking cookies and stealing personal information from your computer and generally giving legitimate ads a really, really bad name. Any advert company that seeks to create ads that trick, dupe, steal, exploit or otherwise cheat their way into my PC and attention deserve to be stuck with a cheap 300 baud acoustic modem dialing into an HP-1000 time share service with an ASCII scope to get their weekly data feed from tape for the next 20 years.
Them, company that hired them, their aunts, uncles, siblings and the two Siamese cats next door.
What we are seeing is the natural evolution of things as they are. Measure, countermeasure. It's an engineering thing, and nothing to get uptight about. Ad-blockers will be around as long as these tricksters are.
Pop-up ads, browser hijacks, tracking cookies and their ilk were born out of greed, not necessity.
Also, I might point out that I'm old enough that I used the internet before it was public. Even back in the 1980's it was forbidden to advertise products openly on the 'internet'. Newsgroups routinely banned the emergent spammers and nitwits posting under fake accounts. It wasn't until several of the pay-to-access sites showed up in the early 1990's that "legitimate" pay-for advertising started rearing its ugly head.
I have faith that the industry will work things out. Measure and countermeasure is always going to be the order of the day in the roadrunner and coyote world we inhabit.
And, personally, I'm rooting for the roadrunner. 
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason; the madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.
--G.K. Chesterton
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A lot of people (me included) don't mind the ads as much as the tracking that's done, which is a huge breach of privacy. If websites pulled the ads in the back-end and displayed them as static images with href-links to the advertised product's website, and stopped using cookies to track people, then this would probably not be a problem. Also scripts like AdBlock would struggle to block what look like normal images.
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Out of interest: which part of the tracking do you see as a breach of privacy? Given that ad tracking is based on a GUID (essentially) that's placed in a cookie, the "tracking" is a set of actions (usually page visits) that the given cookie is associated with. Generally there's nothing personally identifiable, and further, you can simply wipe cookies and the tracking's gone. Disappeared in a cloud of bits.
I get the "it feels weird" part. I don't, however, understand where any breach of privacy has actually occurred.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Well, when it' a site like CP that I trust personally it's not something I am particularly concerned about. But when I go to a website for the first time ever and they display an ad that's very closely related to something I recently searched for or discussed on a forum or discussed via email on gmail or yahoo, then that's rather creepy. I just am not fully comfortable with how unrelated websites can show me ads based on my browsing habits.
The model I prefer would be where sites ask me for keywords or topics I am interested in, and they serve me ads on those topics. But the ads are pulled server side and then rendered as static images. The good thing is the ad companies have no clue who I am. Even better for the website, plugins like ad-blocker cannot block what's a regular image in a webpage. Win-win I think.
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Adblockers work on a bunch of things: domain blocking to stop scripts, element removal based on element ID or class name, and image dimensions. They go in and go hard at disrupting websites' business models.
the upshot of this is that advertising is going to become worse, not better. Ad agencies aren't going to take the high road and say "OK, you're right: we need to tone it down and show you sensible, relevant stuff". They are going to make it so if you can't view content without seeing ads.
The irony is that everyone actually wants relevant ads. No one wants the ad systems to know what ads are relevant to them, though. Sites that rely on sensible advertising then throw up our hands and have a quiet cry in the corner.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Well I actually try to optimize my ads, specially with google/gmail. If I see an ad that does not interest me, I close it, and use the popup to let them know why I closed that ad. So far I have not seen much improvement to be honest, but eventually I hope they'll show me relevant ads
Also, I do not condone using ad-blockers on free sites that show legitimate ads.
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Sooner or later the advertisers are going to realize that they are being ripped off. No one clicks the Ads.
At a minimum, they should only pay the sites for clicks, not views.
And reading cookies is stupid. If I Google blenders, showing me an ad for blenders a week later is a waste of time...I've probably already bought the damn thing, and don't really need another.
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AFAIK, only clicks do get paid. And that is exactly the problem: if views were paid, advertisers wouldn't put much effort into making their ads jump in the way wherever they can. Seems like advertisers spend their time inventing new ways of tricking people into inadvertently clicking on an ad, even if they're not interested. And that's what's making them so annoying.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Used to be, and probably still is, click-throughs cost X amount to the advertiser, and impressions cost Y; impressions being just showing up on the page, costing less.
So it's not the advertisers themselves doing it, but the sites they show up on. The website charges more money to the advertisers if you click the ad.
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Most sites that detect AdBlock use a script like this one (which is one of the more popular ones) :
sitexw/FXXXAdBlock · GitHub[^]
I edited the URL/text to avoid getting auto-marked as spam (in case CP does that).
But then some guys came up with this (which is a userscript that works around the above script). Aptly named too.
Mechazawa/FXXXFXXXAdblock · GitHub[^]
Just some trivia on the topic 
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Cool. Thanks for the info.
I will be faarrrkkkking legless before I am carriedcto the car ftombhere. - Michael Martin - Christmas 2015
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Over the past years, I've seen a couple of sites going that route. The first I've seen was arstechnica: at first they blocked the site entirely, offering a subscription instead. But after a storm of protests, they opened up their site again under the condition that you disable your adblocker.
arstechnica is alive and well now: apparently the vast majority of visitors didn't mind whitelisting them, so they keep getting sufficient revenues from their unintrusive ads.
Since then, I've encountered quite a few sites that detect adblockers and ask the viewer to whitelist them. A few (very few so far) even block their content if you don't whitelist them.
I have no qualms whitelisting sites that only show unobtrusive, static ads. But I don't usually stop at any site to consider whitelisting them unless they ask me to. I suspect that's true for most people, so I expect more and more sites will go ahead and ask people to enable ads on their site. I do hope those requests will go hand in hand with trimming down ads to those types that are unobtrusive and reasonable. For those sites I whitelisted that has been true - so far I never revoked an entry.
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Update to my previous response:
Looks like Forbes isn't honest about it's concerns and intent. I just noticed that even with AdBlock disabled, it claims I have it on. I dug among the few addons and plugins I have installed, and then, after disabling Privacy Badger, Forbes finally worked.
The thing is: Privacy Badger does not block ads at all! It only blocks trackers! Sorry, Forbes, you can show me any ads you want, but if you choose to spy on me while claiming something different, then I'm not going to trust you on anything else either. Forbes just died for me 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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Not surprised, it's Forbes, after all.
Thanks for the update.
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Yeah but if I'd just linked to the pic, half the responses would have been fart jokes... 
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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OriginalGriff wrote: half the responses would have been
No....
...probably upwards of 80%.
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