Adblock Plus Maker Proposes Change To Help Sites 615
Dotnaught writes "Wladimir Palant, maker of the Firefox extension Adblock Plus, on Monday proposed a change in his software that would allow publishers, with the consent of Adblock Plus users, to prevent their ads from being blocked. Palant suggested altering his software to recognize a specific meta tag as a signal to bring up an in-line dialog box noting the site publisher's desire to prevent ad blocking. The user would then have to choose to respect that wish or not."
Re:Umm... (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, there's a number of advertising... schemes? Structures. Let's go with that. There's advertising structures that pay for "eyeballs" or "impressions." They don't promise click-throughs, they just want the ad displayed to X# of visitors. They usually get bonuses on click-throughs though.
Re:annoying prompts, on all sites soon (Score:5, Informative)
Except that, if you read the proposal, you'll notice this section:
Adblock Plus will then check the browsing history to see whether the user frequents this site (this could be specified for example as âoevisited the site on three days of the last weekâ) and then display a notification
So you'd only get annoyed once on the sites you revisit.
Re:Also (Score:4, Informative)
What blank space? Just to test, I went back to the front page, found that I had the same option available, and clicked it. Then refreshed to see what changed. Result? Nothing. The layout is identical, both before and after. ABP was tidying away any blank space just fine.
Re:Worse than Ads (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two different ways to read this. (Score:5, Informative)
OK, you see that big red stop-sign icon at the top right? See the little down-arrow to the right of it? Click on that. See how it drops down a menu?
Now, see where it says 'Disable on tech.slashdot.org'? That will disable Adblock Plus on all pages served from tech.slashdot.org. Handy, eh? You can even call up that menu from the main page and then it says 'Disable on slashdot.org' so you can enable ads across the whole site!
Then, whenever you're on a site where the ads are not being blocked, the red stop-sign icon turns into a green go-sign, and the ads appear. Easy!
Re:If I wanted to see ads... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm happy to view, and sometimes click on, a few reasonably inoffensive ads per site. Where I get annoyed is when they're unfriendly to readers. Either they plaster the site so densely that the real content is taking up an unreasonably small proportion of the screen; or they try to slip in ads where you'll accidentally click on them thinking they were navigation elements; or they have obnoxious animated graphics, video, or sound.
I've personally made some effort to resist just throwing in the towel and blocking everything, because I really want to punish specifically the annoying purveyors of ads, not everyone with ad-supported content. For a few years I managed it just by refusing to visit sites with annoying ads; I can do without cnn.com, and can visit news.bbc.co.uk instead (better news, too). But it's gotten progressively worse, so I recently installed AdBlock, but without a default filterset; I add rules for particularly egregious ads as I encounter them. This is tedious, though.
I personally would welcome some easier way to say that I'm okay with a few text ads in the sidebar, but I'm going to block anything that goes beyond that. I don't think this particular proposal is the solution, though--- nothing prevents site owners here from asking for an exemption even though they do have egregiously annoying ads.
Re:Also (Score:5, Informative)
You don't even have to moderate; I'm marked unwilling. I suspect that the metric has to do either with achievement points or with the number of positive comments. (I have moderated in the past, but that was a long time ago; if there are any applicable achievements, they aren't retroactive.)
Re:Fine with me, as long as it's an option (Score:5, Informative)
Hardly. If you read the proposal, you'll notice that even when the flag's present ABP will not present ads by default. And it won't even immediately prompt you, let alone prompt you every time. It first checks whether you visit the site often. If it sees repeated visits recently, then it brings up a bar at the bottom giving you three options: "Let me see how the site looks with ads.", "Keep blocking the ads and don't ask me about this site ever again." and "Keep blocking the ads, but ask me about it next time it qualifies.". If you choose to see how it looks, then you get the site with ads and two options: "Add an exception for this site." and "Keep blocking ads for this site.". So ABP's never, even with the tag, going to allow ads through by default. And with the repeat-visitor logic, it shouldn't even be popping up the question bar too often (unless you keep using the "Ask me later." option).
I'd prefer it to unblock by service (eg. let me tell it "Allow Google AdSense text-only ads through regardless of site."), but as it stands the proposal is hardly a neutering of ABP in any way.
Re:Another extension (Score:4, Informative)
You already have the option to uncheck each extension when the list of "these extension updates are available" appears.
Re:Time for a fork (Score:5, Informative)
Time for a fork. If he's serious about this, Wladimir Palant should /not/ be allowed to control this project. The whole /point/ of Adblock Plus, is to, y'know, BLOCK ADS.
Seriously. He's already being courted by advertizers like this, and is apparantly willing to work with them - he can't be trusted.
Take a breather there, buddy. I don't know why the /. overlords FAILed to include a link to the adblockplus page relevant to the discussion, but here it is: http://adblockplus.org/blog/an-approach-to-fair-ad-blocking [adblockplus.org]
Then, the part of that page that covers your fears: The user should have the final decision. If we allow webmasters to specify which ads the user should view or whether users with Adblock Plus should be allowed to visit their sites, they will try to maximize their profits â" and very soon users will be confronted with intrusive ads everywhere or locked out of all sites. At which point somebody will fork Adblock Plus to âoemake it work againâ and we are back at square one.
And finally, a reminder to the /. people that their fucking unicode parser is broken.
Re:Cue next extension in 3... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the article, about 5% of Firefox users have adblock installed. That's a tiny percentage of Internet users and most of them wouldn't click on adverts anyway.
This puts the level of loss in the 'background noise' category. I don't think it's worth alienating adblock fans over a personal guilt trip.
Re:annoying prompts, on all sites soon (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I've always wondered (Score:4, Informative)
Because if they serve ads from
japi1fas6df.com/273849.gif
nqd92ngfg2i8.net/329518.gif
wndgizn24b0.org/834120.gif
...
they won't be able to track your behavior - your cookies don't transfer from one domain to the other.
Re:Hmm... (Score:4, Informative)
How the fuck did this get an "interesting" mod?
Yes, of course it is. You can do WTF ever you want to copyrighted works, you just can't (necessarily) distribute the original work and/or its derivatives.
If I hated Coca Cola but loved a song that referenced it, I could clip that part out and only listen to my version--I just couldn't (under most licensing schemes) give the Coke-free version to anyone else. I could even write a program that cut that part out for other people, taking an MP3 or wav file or whatever as input, and distribute the program.
I hope the person who modded that insightful gets bitchslapped by a meta-mod.
Re:How about a way to download but not display ads (Score:2, Informative)
The original AdBlock extension had this feature. I don't know where it went in AdBlock Plus.