Oolite Bulletins

Not wishing to offend anyone, I just read on another forum a discussion about how blocking ad servers and their images is immoral. I don't think I could find anything more laughable! Can anyone substantiate this claim with any well-founded reasoning?

[rant]
My view is that, advertising is an unecessary evil. Just like those religious nutters that come from door to door trying to press-gang people into joining them.... If your religion is so great, why hasn't the whole damn world joined up?!!? Same with advertising, if your product is so great and I can't possibly live without it, why don't I know about it? If I want to buy a car, I don't wait until a pop-up ad or graphic appears on a webpage. I go out and actively look for what I want.

Then there is the argument that we are putting companies out of business by taking away reliable revenue. Well, more fool them for sitting there with their thumb up their a***. I'm all for helping the individual by subscriptions or donations, but don't blame me if your business model stinks. Have these people not realized that the dotcom bubble burst a few years ago?
[/rant]

There, I feel much better!

Endless discussion, heh...

For example: BadAstronomy has ads on their messageboards, to get some revenue to make the boards more errrr... economical for the Bad Astronomer, and since those are GoogleAds, they are (mostentimes) related with the subject, so most people think it's ok...

OTOH, the flashing, singing and dancing ads on some site... AAAARGH! (Boy do I utterly hate space.com, for that... Before I had a popupblocker, they just got me ragingly mad half the time, heehee!)

I use AdBlock: A plugin for Mozilla/Firebird. Will remove banner ads on the page, too.

http://www.mozilla.org/

http://www.mozdev.org/

I can't actually remember the last time I came across a site that asked me to click on the ads now and then to support the site (probably a freebie). but then I've been using AdBlock for a while now.

One thing stops me from me from completely denying the existence of Internet Explorer and using Firefox exclusively instead; Firefox doesn't work with my online banking.

That may no longer be true but I fear that my bank has built a website designed to use IE only. (which bites the big one if that is true).

Overall though, Firefox beats the pants off of IE. AdBlock is definately a must have though, that much is for sure. Incidentally, getting further and further off topic, are any Tab Browsinng extensions available for Firefox on the Mac? The most popular one doesn't seem to work on OS X which is a bummer, I really would like that added functionality.

NoSleep, did you download a list of URLs off the internet, or did you spend time adding your own URLs to the blocked list? I downloaded a list off the internet and was a bit concerned that AdBlock seemed to slow down... a lot! I think there are over 1000 URLs in the list. Perhaps the slow down was just during the initial import.

Personally I use privoxy to deal with unwanted ads.

It's a local proxy server that will (optionally) remove ads and popups, de-animate gifs, kill cookies (or make them transient rather than permanent) and a few other goodies too for good measure.

It's open source, and cross platform. I've used it on my mac for quite a while, and I'm using it on windows too. Since it's a proxy server it will work with any browser.

Overall it's very effective at removing crud. Sometimes it goes a little too far in it's crunching of nasties, but it's easy to turn off, and pretty easy to configure.

the url is http://www.privoxy.org

Darkbee wrote:

NoSleep, did you download a list of URLs off the internet, or did you spend time adding your own URLs to the blocked list? I downloaded a list off the internet and was a bit concerned that AdBlock seemed to slow down... a lot! I think there are over 1000 URLs in the list. Perhaps the slow down was just during the initial import.

I do it myself on the sites I go to where the ads annoy me. When you pull up adblock you get a list of links for the page, and the ads ones are usually easy to spot as they come from another site altogether usually. Then, rather than simply blocking all the URLs as given, I look for a keyword and reduce that to a wildcard thus... *doubleclick* so that it will now eliminate all links with that name in it (for all other sites as well). I'd be wary of just importing a list, as I wouldn't be able to monitor what was going on when I entered a new site.

NoSleep wrote:

Darkbee wrote:

NoSleep, did you download a list of URLs off the internet, or did you spend time adding your own URLs to the blocked list? I downloaded a list off the internet and was a bit concerned that AdBlock seemed to slow down... a lot! I think there are over 1000 URLs in the list. Perhaps the slow down was just during the initial import.

I do it myself on the sites I go to where the ads annoy me. When you pull up adblock you get a list of links for the page, and the ads ones are usually easy to spot as they come from another site altogether usually. Then, rather than simply blocking all the URLs as given, I look for a keyword and reduce that to a wildcard thus... *doubleclick* so that it will now eliminate all links with that name in it (for all other sites as well). I'd be wary of just importing a list, as I wouldn't be able to monitor what was going on when I entered a new site.

Looks like you're going a bit wild with your wildcards.... in your example wouldn't http://oolite.aegidian.org/doubleclick/ ... enshot.png be blocked? Not as bad as *ad* I suppose! I get your point though.

As for my downloaded list, it is supposed to only contain known ad-servers. The way I see it, I'm unlikely to miss anything vitally important by blocking them all and if I do then its my own fault for blocking in the first place. Just like spam, if you delete spam aggressively, you might run the risk of deleting legitimate email... thats a risk I'm prepared to take (with a little help from whitelists/safelists etc).

'doubleclick' is the name of one of the main offenders, but the name can crop up anywhere in the URL at times. I take it that link above is bogus, BTW?

Just tried adblocking *aegidean* on here... all it did was remove all the icons... the text remained, although you would have to guess where to click on the page to post etc.... it's easy enough to check if you're accidentally blocking anything though.

NoSleep wrote:

'doubleclick' is the name of one of the main offenders, but the name can crop up anywhere in the URL at times. I take it that link above is bogus, BTW?

Yes, I'm merely being facetiuos, wondered if anyone would actually try it!

It does lead me to wonder if you could screw up someone's browser by blocking *www*... at the very least you could reduce someone's beautiful graphical browser to text only. Something to try when I have way too much spare time on my hands perhaps!

Seems it would probably just clear all the icons/banners from a page, rendering down to HTML only.... I'll give it a spin...

*www* must be set to be ignored as nothing untoward happened at all.

http://oolite.aegidian.org/doubleclick/ ... enshot.png

It doesn't flicker, or makes obnoxious noises... It's not an ad!

cool.
maybe every time the mouse passes by, it could bark loud Thargon curses.