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

Post by jdormit » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 7:06 PM UTC

nashashmi wrote: post #57

This extreme vetting made me disable all of those adblocking lists. Now I manually go through web scripts and block the stuff I don't like. It turns out that majority of ads on the web are served by just a handful of advertisers. So my list of blocks include only 27 websites. And these site turn out to be the notorious displays of junk on the internet. I don't see ads on the web anymore. I also don't get called foul…

Post by calafrax » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 7:14 PM UTC

jleedev wrote: post #61

nitrogen wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always make sure that critical flows in the app won't fail if analytics event fails. Monoprice's site won't allow checkout with uBlock unless you define a function they're trying to call: _satellite = { track: function(){} } With inventions like Google Tag Manager that allow marketing departments to inject JS into the production site, things like this may not even be the developers' fault.

The user is running an extension that breaks random pieces of the web page. Obviously that's not the developer's fault.

Post by LarryMade2 » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

Post by throwaway2016a » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 8:00 PM UTC

Klathmon wrote: post #30

jakub_g wrote: post #7

Another protip: don't name your images "banner.jpg"; "ads.js" and "analytics.js" etc are also not exactly great names. Another protip: Always make sure that critical flows in the app won't fail if analytics event fails. You probably want to wrap calls to analytics provider with your own function, and in that function check for existence of global analytics object like "window.ga" which may fail to load due to adblock…

This shit drives me up a goddamn wall. I had a web app a few years ago that I was using webpack to build the JS with, and the output filename was just a SHA hash of the contents. After an update, I started getting reports that it wasn't working for some people. Turns out they had adblockers that were blocking *ad.js and it just so happened that the SHA hash of the file ended in ad.js

Post by edibleEnergy » Sun, Jul 09, 2017, 8:05 PM UTC

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…