41–47 of 47 posts
I once had a ceo ask why the header image on a prominent section of our website was not showing on his machine. I opened the page, and to my surprise,, the header image didn't show on my computer either, but it showed on my coworkers screen. In my standard "eliminate all simple causes" method I switched to incognito, and the header image loaded. Somehow, I was able to recognize that it was due to an extension that wa…
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The problem is that the end user who has an ad blocker installed doesn't see a big "THIS FEATURE OF THE WEB SITE IS BROKEN BECAUSE YOU HAVE AN AD BLOCKER INSTALLED" message when things don't work. They just see things not work. Maybe a few of the more tech-savvy users will guess that their ad blocker caused the problem, but most users will just assume that your site is crappy. If your site is monetized through someth…
I don't believe you need to be particularly tech-savvy to observe that the ad blocker extension you installed breaks the Internet.
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It makes sense if there's an image with the word "ad" in the url. Probably something similar to that.
A bit frightening to think about: SHA hexdigests (as used in, e.g., cache-busting) can contain the two-character-sequence "ad".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem
...so maybe some of them do have rather silly rulesets.
Ive been burned on this enough times where I know that any weird error that doesn't have an explanation, automatically turn off adblock. 9 times out of 10... works
Since I have JavaScript disabled by default, I encounter plenty of such messages; but almost all of them I can safely ignore. It wouldn't surprise me if there are messages to the effect of "This site is not compatible with adblock, turn off your adblocker for a better experence" - and upon acting on such a message, the poor luser gets bombarded with all manner of popups and other crap. Incidentally, that's a similar experience to when I first started browsing with disabled JavaScript, and made me become much more wary of turning it on just because some site wants me to.
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A bit frightening to think about: SHA hexdigests (as used in, e.g., cache-busting) can contain the two-character-sequence "ad".
I don't think adblockers will be so naive as to block anything that contains "ad" in the URL, but then again, there's a name for the bug caused by this particular type of matching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem ...so maybe some of them do have rather silly rulesets.
The problem being—and this is painful personal experience speaking—web frameworks will frequently also cater to directory inode limits of caching reverse-proxies in their cache-busting code by doing something like this:
"/#{sha[0..1]}/#{sha}.#{orig_ext}"
Ive been burned on this enough times where I know that any weird error that doesn't have an explanation, automatically turn off adblock. 9 times out of 10... works
I would not recommend this as a default choice if you want to benefit from the security aspect of adblocking, as otherwise you might become too easily deceived into turning it off - along the same lines as those fake error message ads. Since I have JavaScript disabled by default, I encounter plenty of such messages; but almost all of them I can safely ignore. It wouldn't surprise me if there are messages to the effec…