How to block the Facebook popup on MajorGeeks and other sites
MajorGeeks is a highly reputable site in the software hosting vertical. It is a software portal that is considered one of the best by many, and while its design and layout may say otherwise, it has its own charm that many users like.
If you visit the website today in your web browser of choice, you may notice that a Facebook Like widget is displayed as an overlay on the screen after a moment.
Here you can click on like to add a like to your Facebook account, or click no the x icon to remove the widget from the page. The overlay is designed in a way that it dims the rest of the screen.
While it may not be evident, you can remove it from the screen with a click on that area as well. Bad news is, this is not a permanent solution.
If you delete cookies of the site in the browser for example, it will be displayed again the next time you visit it and don't click fast enough around to avoid it.
So what can you do about it to block this popup and similar ones permanently?
You need a script or an ad-blocking extension for that. I'm going to highlight how to block it using Adblock Plus on Google Chrome, but the method should be very similar if you use a different ad-blocking extension or script to block these kind of things.
The first thing we need to do is check out the popup to find how it is displayed on the screen. Right-click it and select Inspect Element in Chrome.
The browser displays a source code browser and highlights the element selected. It may not be the main element though, so click on other elements above it until you reach a point where it is still shown as selected in the browser window.
In this case, it is <div id="fanback" style="display: block;"> which is responsible for the popup widget displayed on the screen.
Now to block it in Adblock Plus, click on the extension icon, switch to add your own filters, and add www.majorgeeks.com###fanback to the list.
This should take care of the Facebook popup widget that Major Geeks displays on the site.
The same method works on other sites as well that display popup widgets that you cannot easily block using your ad-blocking extension as it won't recognize the correct element to do so.
Browser extensions such as NoScript block it outright, so that you do not have to do anything in this regard. There are other methods to deal with it, for instance to set the element to display:none; in Stylish or userstyle.css directly (in Firefox).
Have you encountered other popup widgets on sites that you cannot get rid of? Let me know in the comments.
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.