Back in October we ran a story about the founding of Eyos GMBH, the new parent company for Adblock Plus that was founded by Wladimir Palant and Till Faida. And with the company came the idea to change the behavior of Adblock Plus. The managing directors back then mentioned that they had plans to fix the web for both web publishers and users.

Their decision to allow unobtrusive ads to pass through the filter was backed by a user study were 75% of all users stated that they were using an adblocker primarily to block annoying ads on the web, and that they would not mind if unobtrusive ads were displayed to them on websites.

Adblock Plus 2.0 for Firefox will introduce the concept of acceptable ads to all Firefox users who upgrade to or install the new version of the add-on. Users will see a notification once they install or update to the new version.

The notification states that Adblock Plus has been configured to allow non-intrusive advertising. Links lead to a help page with additional information about the new feature and the configuration were the feature can be turned off. The page explains the reason for the move (supporting websites that rely on advertising, forcing websites who use annoying ads to think about it), that users can disable the acceptable ads feature if they so desire, and what the developers consider acceptable ads.

According to their information, acceptable ads are static advertisements (no animations or sounds), preferably text only and use at most one script to avoid delays in page loading times.

A list of acceptable ad providers and websites is available here. The only big name in the list is Google, the remaining filters refer to ads on specific sites (mostly German based). The page states that Adblock Plus has agreements with “some websites and advertisers”. It is not clear how those agreements look like.

Adblock Plus users can disable the feature in the add-on’s Filter options.

I have to admit that I like the move as a webmaster. Why? Because I earn my living from this website with ads on the site. If everyone would block the ads on this site, I would be working in a 9 to 5 job with little or maybe no time to update and maintain this website.

Users still have the option to turn off the the exception list if the want to continue blocking all ads on the Internet.
The new version for Firefox is said to be released tomorrow. The Chrome version will receive an update in the coming months.

What’s your take on the move? Let me know in the comments.

What’s Hot is basically a collection of popular messages and stories by other Google+ users. You find the usual assortment of images, videos, animated gifs and messages listed there. The majority of hot items shared in the What’s Hot section are animated gifs and funny images, nothing in particular what many Internet users want to see in their stream. All messages have in common that they have been “plused” and shared by a lot of users on Google+. Most users probably would not have a problem with the What’s Hot feature if it was only listed in the sidebar and not injected in the user stream directly.

Some Google+ users have voiced complaints. Especially the lack of options to hide the What’s Hot On Google+ feature has been mentioned over and over again.

Gabriel Vasile has posted a solution for Adblock Plus users. The browser extension is available for Google Chrome, Firefox and Safari. All that needs to be done now is to add two new filters to the extension to block the What’s Hot on Google+ section.

• plus.google.com##DIV[class="zhMuaf Tp6dle"]
• A[class="a-j c-i-j-ua tg3b4c qQWXrb g2Lc3b dfrbjb"]

This works as of now. Please note that it can stop working at anytime if Google decides to change the class IDs. I have not found a userscript yet to remove the What’s Hot section on Google Plus. It is however likely that it is only a matter of time until one is released with that functionality.

Found another way to hide the What’s Hot on Google+ section on Google Plus? Let me know in the comments.

Update: The userscript What’s Hot… Isn’t removes the What’s Hot section in the middle of the stream while leaving the link in the sidebar. That’s probably the best way of dealing with it and a great option for users who do not use Adblock Plus in their browsers.

The official announcement dates back to the last day of September 2011. It is a three paragraph announcement that the Eyeo GmbH has been founded, and that Wladimir Palant and Till Faida have become the managing directories of said company. Wladimir’s role as the lead Adblock Plus developer will remain while Till looks more at the financial well being and funding of the company.

A blog post back in August 2011 offers additional information about Wladimir’s decision to back the project by founding a company. Probably the most interesting aspect from a user perspective is that Adblock Plus has not sold out in any form. It also means that Wladimir can now work full-time on the development of Adblock Plus, which will mean faster updates than before.

It is also reassuring that the company will not put money in front of morals or ethics.

If you read the announcements carefully you will find references to “fixing” or “influencing” the web. I recently asked Till what they meant by that and he told me that the main intention of the ad blocker was to eliminate “bad” advertisement on the Internet. They do realize that the application’s current state hurts web publishers and companies who rely on advertising revenue to provide their services for free on the Internet.

A decision was made to give users an option to support their favorite websites by only blocking annoying and obtrusive ads instead of all advertisements. According to one of their studies 75% of all Adblock Plus users would like “to only block annoying ads and let unobtrusive ads go through to facilitate revenues for their favourite websites”.

Till did not fail to mention that it was the company’s “top priority to let the users decide” whether they want to continue blocking all forms of advertisements or only annoying forms.

That’s an interesting prospect from a webmaster’s point of view, considering that many rely on advertising revenue to offer their services on the Internet.

The discussion as to what is considered acceptable and what is not is publicly discussed on the Adblock Plus forum.

Adblock Plus is an extension for the Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and K-Meleon web browser.

A user of the DSL Reports forum has converted the Adblock Plus list of blocked advertisement into an XML format that can be imported into Internet Explorer 8. All that needs to be done is to download the xml file from the website and import it into Internet Explorer 8 so that all of the ads and ad providers on that list are blocked automatically in Internet Explorer 8. The file has a size of more than eight Kilobytes and can be imported into Internet Explorer the following way after downloading and unpacking it.

Open Internet Explorer 8. Access Tools > InPrivate Filtering Settings from the toolbar menu.

A click on the Advanced Settings link in the lower half will open a new window that can be used to import filters in xml format.

The xml list can be imported easily by clicking on the Import button and selecting the xml file from the local hard drive. A message should appear notifying the user that the list was successfully imported. The main window should be filled with blocking rules after clicking ok.

The ads will now be automatically blocked in Internet Explorer. The only problems with this approach are that there is no way of automatically updating the list in regular intervals. There is also no option to enable the list globally but disable it on selected websites.

Some users might prefer do whitelist websites on a per-site basis and that is perfectly reasonable. Others prefer to whitelist all bookmarks at once which is not doable in the options of the add-on. The author of the add-on however has created a script (discovered at Firefox Mastery) that takes the contents of a bookmarks file and creates a whitelist file out of it.

The process itself is pretty simple, users do need to have access to their bookmarks in html format though. Firefox 2 users can simply access the bookmarks.html file in the Firefox profile folder while Firefox 3 users need to export the bookmarks into html format first which can be done in the Bookmarks Manager.

Once the file is available it has to be opened in a text editor. All contents need to be copied and pasted into the script on the Adblock Plus website.

That script will generate a whitelist file for Adblock Plus which can be imported in the preferences of the add-on.

The filter list grows over time, I know mine does and becomes ineffective this way due to duplicate entries and ineffective usage of space in the filter list. Thankfully though the Adblock website offers a way to optimize this filter list to make it more effective. Before you can start with the optimization you need to export your current filter list.

Press CTRL + SHIFT + A to open Adblock Plus. Click on Filters > Export Filters to save the filter list as a text document. Now load the Adblock Plus optimization website and paste the contents of the saved filtered list into the form.

The default options that are available at the bottom should be sufficient for most users. Just make sure you check Optimize including preexisting RegExes if you already have an optimized version but added new filters to that one. Click on the optimize button which should display some stats and of course the new optimized filter list.

Now copy and paste the new filter list into a text document and import it again into Adblock Plus. Press CTRL + SHIFT + A again and click on Filters > Import Filters. Select the text document that contains the updated filter list and click ok. Make sure you select Overwrite when asked if you want to overwrite or append the filter list.

My filter list, which only contained 12 lines and 364 chars was reduced to 1 line and 251 chars which means a reduction of 91.7 % and 31 %.

Update:

Wladimir Palant from Adblock Plus contacted me and told me that Adblock Plus users should use the following two scripts if they want to optimize their filter list:

http://adblockplus.org/en/deregifier
http://adblockplus.org/en/redundancy_check