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‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

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Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#111

Post by lioeters »

unnouinceput wrote: post #94

Quote: "In the past six months, EasyList changes have broken the buy buttons on commerce site The Inventory, the video player on Animal Planet, disrupted site navigation on Fandom, and disrupted the style and CSS loading process on job search site Indeed." Good, very good. Break them all. Learn to go back to basics, use TABLE, not gazzilion of nested DIV's for what should be a single BUTTON element instead. I run uBl…

> I run uBlock Origins, NoScript and Privacy Badger; and whenever I go, to clients, friends, family, I'll always put them up.

Yes! I'm doing this too, as a kind of community service. If sites get broken because their privacy-invading "like" button doesn't work, that's on them. People will just move on.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#112

Post by ryandrake »

jrockway wrote: post #88
ryandrake wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working in big tech companies for too long. When I got to that part, I thought to myself, "Wait, they think hundreds of thousands is a lot of content? That should be fixable over someone's lunch break!"

What big tech company do you work at that can edit other people's websites to link to renamed URLs? I am sure that "mv /www-data/adverts /www-data/foobar" is a trivial operation. Making links work (adblock will block the 302 you skillfully put in place) is harder.

Ahh--the lunch break comment assumed that this was a local change to hundreds of thousands of pages, so disregard that. I was commenting more on the notion that hundreds of thousands of files/urls/database records is a lot. It sounds like a lot to the average reader.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#113

Post by OrgNet »

jarofgreen wrote: post #110
OrgNet wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

makes me want to avoid Autotrader... where did this /advert/ come from anyways...

I haven't looked, but I'm guessing ... When you list a second hand car for sale, that's an "advert". Sometimes the adverts are the content you want :-)

so they probably could have used /vehicle/, to be more specific

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#114

Post by jankotek »

CivBase wrote: post #85

> the change would have involved fixing hundreds of thousands of pages Even if these pages are static files (although any site opetating at that scale should have some kind of page-generation system), this still sounds like it could be resolved with a simple find-replace using . EasyList is definitely in the right here. Adding an exception results in an unnecessary performance penalty and creates more complexity for…

They would have to change URL to those pages

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#115

Post by Joking_Phantom »

Raed667 wrote: post #20

This is basically a hit piece on Easylist. My take after reading this, is that the author wants EasyList to either not exist or to be run by "experts in balancing publisher monetization" (aka adman)

Not just basically - it is a hit piece. It's a website run by and for advertisers, publishers, and media, aiming to monetize content as much as possible. They are supported by advertisers masquerading as ad blockers (uBlock trying to pretend to be uBlock Origin) and sites that literally just advertise.

Just another day of unsavory corporations and the assholes that run them trying to mislead the average consumer.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#116

Post by kgwxd »

coldpie wrote: post #52
papln wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it distinguish itself without giving up the name that Aljoudi (and not AdBlock) has been hijacking? Imagine if a company launched a (non-Google) "Chromium" browser or non-Microsoft "Explorer" or "Edge", how would the authentic developer defend against that? (Probably with a trademark suit, which is a dificult strategy for a tiny open source project). gorhill could create a brand new name to replace Origin, bu…

It sucks to have to give up the name, but maybe it's just time to rip off that band-aid and do it.

I feel the same way. If it contains the word uBlock, it's going to loose no matter what.

Maybe fork uBlock Origin, give it a new name, update the current uBlock Origin official pages to point to the new one, keeping links in older threads still relevant for a while.

I'd do my part and promote the new name as much as possible. I'm already spending a lot of time typing out the explanation about the current name whenever I get a chance.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#117

Post by mattkevan »

FussyZeus wrote: post #27
luma wrote: post #6

This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.

Also as a quick aside, they mention that AutoTrader would've had to fix "hundreds of thousands of pages" and I'm calling bullshit. No site of that magnitude is using straight up HTML pages. Even if it's a jekyll thing where you'd have to change a bunch of templates, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the required changes could be done in a few seconds with any decent text editor.

It’s perfectly possible.

I once worked on a site that had over 25k pages, all hand coded HTML with Microsoft Frontpage. And all in the root folder.

Not even the owner knew how many pages there actually were.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#118

Post by FussyZeus »

ksangeelee wrote: post #90
donarb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is is that AutoTrader is a website that advertises cars, they don't even have any other advertising on their site. And because EasyList doesn't like a word in their URL, the website breaks through no fault of their own. If the owner of the website is doing nothing wrong, the onus is on the owner of the blocking technology to come up with a system that works correctly.

I just visited the AutoTrader site (from the UK), and uBlock Origin blocked 34 requests related to ads and tracking. I recall in the past having been surprised at the number of extra requests being made via their site. They don't serve only vehicle listings.

It would be rather ironic if the post you replied to only thought they ran no ads because they forgot they ran an ad blocker.

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#119

Post by thiagomgd »

GordonS wrote: post #42
patd wrote: post #8

I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore. I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website. But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussio…

I had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked. I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content? I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long t…

Buttons as in CSS stylized anchor elements point to twitter.com/whatever, or loading javascript, added dynamically, etc? Because most social media buttons have trackers, so...

Re: ‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

#120

Post by kamyarg »

Useless article is useless, there is no point in emphasising the maintainers are men. No one is preventing 4 women or LGBTQ+ from starting a list with a better end user experience. But I guess their end goal is "balancing publisher monetization" which is too optimistic, no one would want to see slower pages with crap wherever they go.
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