Ad Blocking Discussion Heats Up

[Martin]

Recently the very popular tech news site Arstechnica decided to block visitors of their site that used a very popular ad blocker (many think it was Adblocker Plus for Firefox). The way they implemented that change was without doubt not the best as they did not give their community a warning or explained their issues with ad blocking before starting to block the ad blocking users from accessing their contents.

The experiment lasted for only 12 hours and everything seems to be back at normal. The discussion on the ad blocking blocking (ha) was very intense. The post over at Ars has over 1800 comments currently with no end in sight.

Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

To be honest, I also thought about blocking ad blockers from ghacks.net. The ads on the site pay my bills and make it possible for me to write on the site. If I would not have that revenue I would have to find another job which would mean that I could not afford to pay other authors (Jack with his Linux articles) and that my contributions would be reduced a lot maybe to the point where I would simply give up.

I do on the other hand understand the need for ad blocking on many sites, especially those with popups and annoying ads.

[Martin]

I usually handle the situation the following way as a web surfer: If I visit a site regularly I disable ad blocking, or more precisely whitelist the site in NoScript, to give them something back for the information they provide. I usually do not do this for sites that I visit only once mainly because it would take to long to configure.

I always keep websites blacklisted if their ads are obtrusive.

[libeco]

I hate ads that get in my way, like those expanding Flash ads or popups. During the years I have developed banner blindness, which has a positive effect for me as I can just go over a page and ignore the ads. However, when regular images look a little bit like ads, I also ignore them.

I have Maxthon set up so that it blocks popups, but I don't block other ads.

[Duckeenie]

Unfortunately the industry did this to itself by using deceitful methods of advertising and increasingly irritating people. You broke it, you fix it, too late to come begging for forgiveness now.

[Martin]

Duckeenie, you do not see a difference between advertising companies and websites or websites that try to only display "non-irritating" ads and those that bombard the visitor with popups and ads that try to catch the users attention by all means?

[Flatlands]

I see no ads, if I do and can't block them the web site webmaster gets an email just before I block them forever.

[libeco]

Duckeenie, you do not see a difference between advertising companies and websites or websites that try to only display "non-irritating" ads and those that bombard the visitor with popups and ads that try to catch the users attention by all means?

I can understand his reaction. Some companies just misuse the availabilites of the internet. In fact, Flash has a bad name because of all the ads built with it. Now Im certainly no Flash-fan, but it surely doesn't deserve such a bad name for something other companies use it for. The same goes for ads, some companies just spoil it for the rest. Ad makers need to constantly come up with new ideas to get peoples attention, now it's time for something new.

[Transcontinental]

Here we have three "walls" which defend on both security and advertisement levels (not to say these two levels appeared more than once as being "intricated", mixed).
First wall is HOSTS file, handled by an app called HostsMan, which as my choice combines 4 HOSTS files (MVPS, hpHosts, Peter Lowe's AdServer List, Camelon's Ad's Source) ;
Second wall is SpyBoot S&D, which also ads its layer to the HOSTS file ;
Third wall is an application called Ad Muncher.
Now, of these three walls I can decide for per-site exceptions only with Ad Muncher, but most of the time even with an exception at AdMuncher's level, the two other walls will refuse link access since they handle the majority of ad/stats/malware known URLs.

So it's quite difficult to handle exceptions in these conditions. One may ask why such a defense? Well, for one thing, advertisement which in itself is not a bad thing in the principle (You made, you want to sell, you talk about it) has not respected the rules of information but has collapsed to a sort of beast with no limits, be it banners, pop-ups, flash for the Web, be it inconsiderate non argumented craps on radio/tv/papers. Second thing is, on the Web and as i said, this known intrication of advertisement and malware URLs, which leads to the fact that combatting one combats the other, and that is the fault of advertisers, not my, not our fault.

[smart_niec5]

the above post does not seem to be much informative as it contacts much things that lie rest to the topic

[Transcontinental]

the above post does not seem to be much informative as it contacts much things that lie rest to the topic

Informative for informative: which post and your arguments, please