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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

#121

Post by donarb »

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.

Ooops, that's my misread of the forum posting from the AutoTrader team. They have 2 sites, one public, the other is a portal for car dealers to post cars in which they stated does not serve ads. The problem they were having though is that the ad blocker was affecting popup menus within their site.

https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148&sid=e0edf...

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

#122

Post by hendersoon »

“It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this,” said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program. “I don’t think they mean any harm or have any malicious intentions. But it’s not like they were experts in balancing publisher monetization, or like they were elected. They’re just four dudes.”

Reading the article, "balancing publisher monetization" provoked an immediate visceral vocal response from me. Truly hilarious.

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

#123

Post by stefan_ »

sp332 wrote: post #98
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.

Easylist is not well maintained, and sometimes they have really petty arguments with website owners instead of just fixing rules that break actual content. For example, they have a specific list of sites that are not allowed to show Amazon affiliate links. They don't block all such links as a policy or anything, it just breaks specific websites. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=37621623#p3762...

I've read the EasyList forum thread linked above for the AutoTrader site, and the issue there was indeed a generic rule that just breaks every link containing advert. That is some monumental, unfathomable stupidity. And instead of realizing that, they have the gall to refer to that rule existing for a very long time!

The same issue was seen with Spamhaus and similar IP block services for eMail spam. What were selfless intentions quickly morphed into ineffective, power-crazed gatekeepers and extortion artists that have made SMTP an unusable protocol unless you are Google or Amazon.

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

#124

Post by targonca »

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 simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages

So, was it simple elements linking to your Twitter/Facebook page?

Or was it maybe a metric ton of obfuscated JS fetched from a Twitter/Facebook CDN, that would relay every bit of data about your visitor, and as a side-effect display a button?

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

#125

Post by ksangeelee »

donarb wrote: post #121
ksangeelee wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ooops, that's my misread of the forum posting from the AutoTrader team. They have 2 sites, one public, the other is a portal for car dealers to post cars in which they stated does not serve ads. The problem they were having though is that the ad blocker was affecting popup menus within their site. https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148&sid=e0edf...

In that light, I agree with your original comment, though it's amusingly ironic that their portal site was negatively impacted by mitigation measures against the kind of things their public site engages in.

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

#126

Post by perlgeek »

Many (even pretty well-known) Open Source projects would be happy to have four regularly active maintainers.

"Just four dudes" sounds dismissive, but everyone starts out as "just one dude" (or dudette, or whatever the proper female form of dude is), and sometimes, more join. Often that's not the case, and the project's health hinges on just one maintainer.

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

#127

Post by merpnderp »

bspammer wrote: post #77
merpnderp wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wish a real version was available on Safari.

Not sure what you mean by "real version" but this one works just fine for me: https://safari-extensions.apple.com/details/?id=com.el1t.uBl... It's true that it's about a year out of date, but I've never had any ads get through regardless.

It is my understanding that this is not an official port by Raymond Hill and that his name is being used without his permission. If someone knows what the actual story is on this, I'd love to know.

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

#128

Post by [deleted] »

stefan_ wrote: post #123
sp332 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easylist is not well maintained, and sometimes they have really petty arguments with website owners instead of just fixing rules that break actual content. For example, they have a specific list of sites that are not allowed to show Amazon affiliate links. They don't block all such links as a policy or anything, it just breaks specific websites. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=37621623#p3762...

I've read the EasyList forum thread linked above for the AutoTrader site, and the issue there was indeed a generic rule that just breaks every link containing advert . That is some monumental, unfathomable stupidity. And instead of realizing that, they have the gall to refer to that rule existing for a very long time! The same issue was seen with Spamhaus and similar IP block services for eMail spam. What were selfle…

[deleted]

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

#129

Post by duskwuff »

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…

> disrupted site navigation on Fandom

Fandom (aka Wikia), in particular, has run some incredibly intrusive -- and occasionally even malicious -- ads on some of their sites. I have very little sympathy for them.

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

#130

Post by papln »

yepguy wrote: post #34
Causality1 wrote: post #17

I fear that with adblocking nearing 25% market penetration we're going to see fundamental changes in the way ads are delivered in response. Maybe a transition from third party ad servers to locally hosted ads that have to be added to block lists individually. Maybe YouTube will start inserting unblockable ads directly into the video stream. Fine people like Raymond Hill will keep fighting the good fight but I wonder…

If that happens, projects like Adblock Radio will hopefully step in to make "unblockable" ads more tolerable, by automatically turning the volume down for example. https://www.adblockradio.com/en/

Isn't that a Browser feature that was/is fixed in 2019?

Unrequested audio is flat-out absurd behavior in a browser.

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