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A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

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Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#41

Post by chillydawg »

vsund wrote: post #16

Here's @vsund, author of this commit message. I understand that the title may was a bit clickbaity and now the title got renamed to a more rational one (which is totally ok). Unfortunately the new title "A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'" doesn't reflect the situation very well in my opinion. The library didn't fail (mainly because there is no library yet), what instead h…

As one of an extremely large group of people who will never use that library but DO get protected from some ads and tracking by blacklisting beacon.js, I disagree that it's an issue with ad blockers.

The internet is a toxic place, to put it mildly, and if you're getting into any kind of public facing service on it, you need to know exactly what you're doing.

Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#42

Post by pastelsky »

Happened to me as well when I published the source for a analytics browser extension on github (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-l...)

Anything to do with JavaScript on the page would fail. Thankfully, github's support team was very helpful in pointing out that uBlock was the cause.

Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#43

Post by WiseWeasel »

In the same vein, I was recently working on a web app with a path at /advertisers, and discovered that ad blockers were preventing any AJAX requests to resources in that path. You might think twice before naming your paths to something containing the word 'advert'.

Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#44

Post by vsund »

chillydawg wrote: post #41
vsund wrote: post #16

Here's @vsund, author of this commit message. I understand that the title may was a bit clickbaity and now the title got renamed to a more rational one (which is totally ok). Unfortunately the new title "A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'" doesn't reflect the situation very well in my opinion. The library didn't fail (mainly because there is no library yet), what instead h…

As one of an extremely large group of people who will never use that library but DO get protected from some ads and tracking by blacklisting beacon.js, I disagree that it's an issue with ad blockers. The internet is a toxic place, to put it mildly, and if you're getting into any kind of public facing service on it, you need to know exactly what you're doing.

I totally agree with you, but I think adblockers could do better than just block all requests that have "beacon.js" in it. But yeah, I definitely prefer many protected users about one working library :)

There are so many possibilities to block content, I'm sure that we could do better with protecting users against tracking while ensuring that less content gets blocked false-positive.

Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#45

Post by always_good »

WiseWeasel wrote: post #43

In the same vein, I was recently working on a web app with a path at /advertisers, and discovered that ad blockers were preventing any AJAX requests to resources in that path. You might think twice before naming your paths to something containing the word 'advert'.

A couple years ago I was bucketing hash filenames into subfolders by their first byte, like "b328ab391bbeb686b5fc.jpg" into the "b3" folder.

Every once in a while, an image wouldn't load for some people on my website, and I couldn't figure out why until I listed out the paths of the images that had been reported over the last few days.

    /ad/ad67f2864a97aa80be22.jpg
    /ad/ad381cbc443a4fc56e7a.jpg
    /ad/adc225a332e69437a3b5.jpg

Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#47

Post by DanBC »

akvadrako wrote: post #38
DanBC wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't assume most people are polite and reasonable like you. Many people are arseholes. You're choosing to use either the ad-blocker, or the software, and you've chosen the ad-blocker. You can see how tiresome it would be to have a flood of rude people saying "your software sucks", when there's nothing wrong with the software. There's a problem with the ad-blocker that the user has. The bug report should go to that a…

Except software which doesn't work with an adblocker does "suck". Sure, potential users could phrase it more politely, but for many of them (me included), it's a minimum requirement. At least "sucking" is better than being totally useless.

But in the example given the reason the software doesn't work isn't because it needs ads. It's because the ad blocker is broken.

Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#49

Post by rsj_hn »

DanBC wrote: post #9
goodplay wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you really blame them? Websites became hostile to users and users reacted. I don't know what your software is, and this certainly isn't directed at you, but if I'm forced to make a choice between using an ad blocker or using some software, I'll always choose the ad blocker (unless I was forced to use said software), especially if there are alternatives. There are no real alternatives to using an ad blocker.

Don't assume most people are polite and reasonable like you. Many people are arseholes. You're choosing to use either the ad-blocker, or the software, and you've chosen the ad-blocker. You can see how tiresome it would be to have a flood of rude people saying "your software sucks", when there's nothing wrong with the software. There's a problem with the ad-blocker that the user has. The bug report should go to that a…

The thing is, the software does suck some of the time. Here too, I'm not saying your software sucks, but web developers have developed several bad habits that put users at risk for no particular reason other than sheer laziness.

here are some examples:

1) Instead of putting third party scripts under your own version control and hosting them yourself, you host them from a "free" CDN which then stores tracking cookies in the origin of the user loading the script. How hard is it to serve all the js libraries you need from your own server?

2) You like some nice widget, like Google Maps. But hey, to use this widget, you need to load a third party script in your origin. No biggie, it's better than paying for a maps widget, right? Except now the user has a tracking cookie in your origin and you didn't disclose this or give the user an option to opt out. What you could have done is loaded that map inside an iframe that is served from a content domain or throwaway domain, so that there is a separation between your cookies and your scripts and the third party cookies and their scripts. This goes for all other widgets as well.

In the above two examples, the developers aren't being paid or are receiving revenue in exchange for installing tracking cookies in their origin, they are just letting it happen because they don't care and they want things to be easier on them.

I get that there are ad supported websites, and if this is your business model, then you are free to give it a go -- but I get upset when the justification for the tracking cookie is developer convenience rather than any kind of business decision to drive revenue.

Re: A JavaScript browser library fails due to an adblocker blacklisting 'beacon.js'

#50

Post by kronos29296 »

prebrov wrote: post #33
dmurray wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another protip: don't name your images "banner.jpg"; "ads.js" and "analytics.js" etc are also not exactly great names. This is good advice even if you are designing banner ads or intrusive analytics! I often wondered how many ads get blocked by the very simple rules usually seen at the top of adblock lists: /ads/ etc. Ads vs adblockers is an arms race, and it seems like renaming the ads files to a random per-deploy…

They do. I've recently encountered a video ad startup that runs a proxy wrapping VAST responses into a VMAP. So, a website would request an ad not from DFP, but from an inconspicuous CloudFront URL. These CF distributions are deployed for each publisher and you'd have to block them one by one, not being able to block the whole ad platform. They said that some adblockers can discover ad servers by parsing responses. I…

Like all arms races, one day it will all blow up in our faces. Since it is not a literal arms races, it will metaphorically blow up in our computers. Hope somebody resolves it before it really does. (Not gonna happen though)
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