Adblock Plus Developers To Allow 'Acceptable' Ads

First time accepted submitter Roman Grazhdan writes "Developers of Adblock Plus, an award-winning add-on for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome boasting over 12,000,000 users, announced that starting from version 2.0 the extension would come with a white list of unobtrusive, privacy-respected ads. These will be allowed by default; users will still be able to block them by unchecking 'Allow non-intrusive advertising.' The developers say: 'Only 25% of the Adblock Plus users seem to be strictly against any advertising.' What is this — betrayal of ideals of annoyance-free web or birth of independent authority for standards for advertisement?" Ads are sometimes annoying, but they also make certain websites (like this one!) possible. Getting the balance right is tricky — I know I often avoid sites because of interstitial advertising, pop-ups, etc. Whitelisting sounds like a good way to reward sites that try to keep it subtle; offloading and generalizing the task of categorizing ads into annoying or acceptable gives sites and advertisers a good threshold to duck beneath. Next step I'd like to see: a sliding scale, so browsers can be set to zero, or eleven, for tolerable annoyance. Update: 12/13 14:54 GMT by T : My fault: I liked the story so much that I missed it the first time.

Re:This is a duplicate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Blocking ads is not stealing content. You are awfully brainwashed.

Re:They got paid for this...

[Anonymous Coward]

that's some old shit for which noscript guy quickly apologized for and remedied in an update immediately after he was called on it. But it should be noted that the adblock guy went out of his way to put a blocking rule on noscript guy's url for donations which prompted noscript guy to mess with adblock rules in the first place. adblock guy has long been regarded as an asshole, and now he's regarded as a sellout as well.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/adblock-noscript.html

It started as a sort of a phallic e-contest revolving around advertisement. The Noscript developer Giorgio realized he was losing revenue because of the way Adblock Plus filters were written and decided to change his product, the highly popular security extension Noscript, to circumvent the barriers presented by the ad-blocking software. On the other end of the fighting ring, the Adblock Plus developer, Wladimir, started writing more complex filtering rules specially designed to block Noscript website content, including ads, from loading.

adblock guy has long been regarded as an asshole, and now he's regarded as a sellout as well.