Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Everything about using Adblock Plus on Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey
Locked
MonztA
ABP Developer
Posts: 3957
Joined: Mon Aug 14, 2006 12:18 am
Location: Germany

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by MonztA »

lulwut? wrote:
MonztA wrote: Are you seriously comparing that NoScript debacle with this 'acceptable ads' feature? This is an official feature, well-documented and optional.
Yes, I am. That was an official feature as well, and within a few days, it was optional as well. I dare say, it was also fairly well documented, by Maone himself.
Are we both talking about the obfuscated code Maone put in NoScript to break Adblock Plus to get his ads displayed on his sites?
lulwut?

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by lulwut? »

LorenzoC wrote:@lulwut?:
I am testing ABP 2.
When you install ABP it enables two subscriptions by default.
One is your regular subscription for blocking/hiding content and the other is the "acceptable advertisement" subscription.
The second one is hidden so you cannot see what rules it contains unless you set the "about:config" preference on "true".
Wladimir states this is for "usability" issues but IMHO it makes it less "transparent" and should be avoided.

You can "opt-out" and opt-in" both subscriptions in the same way.
Like I said above, all this has always been included in the very mechanism of subscriptions.
No news from a technical stand point.

What is new here is ABP directly involved in agreements with advertisers and getting money for including them in the "acceptable advertisement" subscription.
IMHO the above procedure makes zero difference.
Thanks for that. I agree that is similar to prior behavior, but for people that click-through, their privacy is at risk, and the project does fulfill its normal purpose (Blocking ads.). Secondly, I strongly disagree with not being able to see the rules in the subscription. Like you, I believe that should be avoided, at all cost if necessary. Transparency is important... Something else important however, is what will happen upon update, in an existing installation. If that subscription is automagically selected, as has been suggested, Wladimir modifies user settings. That's a fairly large no-no.
lulwut?

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by lulwut? »

MonztA wrote:
lulwut? wrote:
MonztA wrote: Are you seriously comparing that NoScript debacle with this 'acceptable ads' feature? This is an official feature, well-documented and optional.
Yes, I am. That was an official feature as well, and within a few days, it was optional as well. I dare say, it was also fairly well documented, by Maone himself.
Are we both talking about the obfuscated code Maone put in NoScript to break Adblock Plus to get his ads displayed on his sites?
Specifically, I am speaking about the "NoScript development filterlist". I apologize if I was unclear.
LorenzoC

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by LorenzoC »

I installed ABP2 over Aurora clean profile so I can't say what happens when you update.
I suspect the "acceptable advertisement" subscription gets added by default, together with the new ABP GUI.
Acutally you don't see it as a real subscription but just as a checkbox that is thicked, unless you edit the said "about:config" setting.

But I guess you are not considering what I wrote above, ALL subcriptions include an huge section of whitelisting rules.
Yes, they are usually meant to resolve some issues when a blocking filter disables a feature on some Web site by mistake.
But they could be used as well to whitelist advertisement at any given time, exactly like the "acceptable advertisement" subscription does.

So right now it is up to the user to agree with the "acceptable advertisement" concept and to trust ABP folks about the selection of what advertisements to include.
Given that you support the "acceptable" idea, probably ABP is more trustworthy than any "volunteer" that provides another subscription.

So far so good.
I insist that the sore thumb is the relationship between ABP and advertisers.
lulwut?

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by lulwut? »

While it's true that any one of the individual filterlists could, at any time, include weird whitelist entries, they would be transparent in the filterlist, Furthermore, the default lists currently both block all ads, so the goal is rather different. Also, I don't actually support any type of advertisement. I just seek compromise and change, rather than a total flame war. Updating is a great concern, and I'll see soon what actually happens. Lastly, I'm also wondering what happens if one of the existing filters conflicts with the whitelist filters. Given that the blacklist filters could be of my own design, and the whitelist not, I see no justified reason for the whitelist to every supersede a match on the blacklist.
LorenzoC

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by LorenzoC »

Subcriptions are not much transparent to the casual user, due the sintax of rules and the fact that they include 10.000 lines.
The OFFICIAL policy of current subscriptions is to "nuke" everything but you see it is a matter of trust.

Whitelisting rules have the higher priority so they don't conflict, they override any blocking rule.
It has always been this way.
So if you load two different subscriptions, a whitelisting rule in one of the list can override one or more blocking rule from another list.
There can be problems also with rules from two different lists that use different criteria for blocking or whitelisting and this is the reason why you should not load subscriptions that aren't meant to complement each other.

About custom filters, yes, same here. I can make my own rules in both directions, so I don't need a subscription when I want to support some site through advertisement.
But it is not a problem UNTIL we can opt-out the "non intrusive advertisement" subscription.

On a side note, I am not sure that disabling it also removes the loaded filters, probably not.
I guess to remove you must visualize the subscription and delete instead of disable.
Chris

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Chris »

You write:
Because that's unfortunately the only way to reach the goals outlined above. If we ask users to enable this feature then most of them won't do it — simply because they never change any settings unless absolutely necessary
So force them to choose after the update. Let them make the decision. Give them two radio buttons with an explanation. If the polls are right, 75% of the users will chose to opt-in and everything is fine.
lulwut?

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by lulwut? »

Chris wrote:You write:
So force them to choose after the update. Let them make the decision. Give them two radio buttons with an explanation. If the polls are right, 75% of the users will chose to opt-in and everything is fine.
I don't like that option much, but that is still much more palatable compared to the current method. I second this idea.
no-ads

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by no-ads »

This video expresses my sentiment on what this change does to adblock plus users:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KqqRPvM_Sw

Is there anything that Mozilla can do to prevent this from being released? Surely, there are some standards that must be followed..
darthmarth37
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2011 5:07 am

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by darthmarth37 »

If the survey results are truly representative of the user base then this seems like a great idea. Implementing the whitelist with $sitekey filters seems like a particularly good plan. But what prevents the "Acceptable Ads" subscription from using the same UI and code path as all other subscriptions? Why does it need to be treated specially instead of simply being included by default?
kadeka

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by kadeka »

It's a shame that you allow this plague:

"! Text ads on Sedo parking domains
@@$sitekey=MFwwDQYJKoZIhvcNAQEBBQADSwAwSAJBANnylWw2vLY4hUn9w06zQKbhKBfvjFUCsdFlb6TdQhxb9RXWXuI4t31c+o8fYOv/s8q1LGPga3DE1L/tHU4LENMCAwEAAQ"

I don't really have a problem with some text-ads, but to promote domain-grabbing and hijacking is a crime against the internet.
joblack
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2011 10:33 am

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by joblack »

It's a shame what Adblock is doing. I will immediately search for another 'trustworthy' solution.
LorenzoC

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by LorenzoC »

@joblack:
If such alternative solution already existed or was even close we weren't discussing if this stuff right now.
To some extent this is the funny part.
Just an other Username

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by Just an other Username »

lulwut? wrote:Specifically, I am speaking about the "NoScript development filterlist". I apologize if I was unclear.
Reminded me too. That was written back then:
Of course, adding a note to the description that almost nobody will read anyway wasn’t the only change I wanted to see. Adblock Plus allows other extensions to add filter subscriptions but that wasn’t supposed to happen without user’s consent. In case of NoScript, asking the user whether this filter subscription should be added was clearly required. But that would probably make too many people notice that something fishy is going on and decline.

[...]

NoScript might be somewhat extreme but the “business offer” emails I occasionally see in my inbox make me think that we will see more of this. Companies start to recognize the potential of Firefox extensions and push extension authors into monetizing their extensions by questionable means — at the expense of the users.

http://adblockplus.org/blog/attention-noscript-users
Could the new whitelist also introduce new XSS vulnerabilities?
anubis

Re: Allowing acceptable ads in Adblock Plus

Post by anubis »

Which survey, i've never saw it.
Locked