Ask HN: Blacklist Forbes?

Would it be possible to blacklist forbes.com links? They now block viewers who are using ad blockers, and have recently been serving advertising malware to visitors [1].

They also have awful interstitial ads [2] and, while they masquerade as a news organization, are actually a blog farm [3].

Blocking Forbes would be no great loss in terms of content, and would avoid a surprising amount of advertising- (and malware-) generated pain.

[1]: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware

[2]:

[3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3zs6qk/gq_and_forbes_go_after_ad_blocker_users_rather/cyp2uls?context=3#cyowy51

I agree.

But I would go even farther. Block every site where you won't be able to read the content without having Javascript enabled. I have experienced several blogs where you won't see anything without Javascript.

Is it possible? Of course it is! From their current site I gathered these domains (these are the ones uBlock doesn't block by default):

forbes.com

forbesimg.com

forbes_video.edgesuite.net

app-ab13.marketo.com

If you're using uBlock Origin you can simply click on the uBlock-icon on the top left in your browser, click on the grey bar on top of the box that opened, go to "My Filters" and insert the above snippet into the text box.

Edit: formatting

I find it extreme if a site requires JavaScript + hundreds of kilobytes of frameworks in order to display some text. But you're right, such a measure would probably hide useful content from HN users, thus making HN itself less useful.

That's a little much considering all of the sites that are well beyond static content and must load using RESTful requests. This would completely removing a lot of the web. Maybe if everyone used static sites as the standard when it came to huge sites, mainly corporate; then I would agree.

All in all, blocking all sites that load their content would be insane scraping and more than a handful of problems.