First of all: the change on Friday was a bit of a rush job, I was finishing up lots of things to have a string freeze on Friday (otherwise we would have to delay the release by a week). Changes since then:
- As some people reported, $sitekey rules didn't disable properly. This has been fixed.
- Currently we do not require "Do Not Track" support for the advertisements that we allow. So people who have a privacy subscription installed (EasyPrivacy, Fanboy's Tracking, Adversity Privacy) will not get this feature enabled by default. There is now a documentation section on why it has to be enabled by default in the usual case.
- "Allow non-intrusive advertising" checkbox is good for user experience (easy to switch on or off) but bad for transparency. I've now added a way to disable special treatment of this subscription and also documented where one can find the list.
Now the answers I promised.
Hubird wrote:Firstly I feel that making configuration changes without the express consent of the user is over stepping the bounds of an automatic update (this is no small change). These changes should be opt in for existing users and can be enabled by default for new users if need be.
I feel with you and it wasn't an easy decision to make. However, this isn't something that can be rolled out gradually, to new users only. We got some companies interested, one of them even agreed to disable animations during the pilot phase to meet our requirements. If they notice that it isn't worth doing (only few Adblock Plus users have the feature enabled) they will go back to more annoying ways of advertising because that's where the money is right now.
Hubird wrote:Secondly there seems to be now way for a user to make an informed decision as to weather or not they want to enable this new functionality. How are these acceptable ads allowed (is it a whitelist subscription & if so where can one find it?).
The documentation has been improved in this respect.
vinny86 wrote:@ Hubird : I think the feature is not yet activated. Didn't see any ads yet.
It is activated, it's merely that our list is very small right now.
Mike Rosoft wrote:As I had said, this has been done in the completely wrong way. It should have been strictly opt-in, not opt-out, and it should be a whitelist that a user can view and disable individual entries, not a separate option that you have no option to know, let alone influence, what it does.
See updated documentation - as much as I would like it, opt-in won't work here. As to disabling individual entries, experienced users can do it (and more easier now that you can disable special treatment for this subscription).
Mike Rosoft wrote:To elaborate, not everybody agrees with your definition of "acceptable ads".
I absolutely agree. Which is why our definition of "acceptable ads" is probably more strict than necessary - we tried to find the lowest common denominator.
Mike Rosoft wrote:That's why the whitelist must be user-manageable.
Here I disagree. The user already can manage his personal whitelist. However, only few people actually do this. That's ok - most people aren't geeks, they don't want to tweak settings all the time, it should just work. So that's how this feature is built - it will just work. But everybody is free to disable it and build up his personal whitelist, as before.
nitrox wrote:My suggestion would be is to add a tick box where the user can either tick to opt in or remove the tick to opt out.
If I understand correctly, you suggest duplicating the checkbox we have in Filter Preferences on the first-run page. This was the original design and it does save one click (the user can uncheck immediately instead of clicking "Filter Preferences" and unchecking there). The reason why I decided against allowing to change the filter subscription and the "acceptable ads" option directly on the first-run page: the first-run page is (obviously) a one-time thing. People change something there and they don't know how to bring it back to change their choice. If they change something in Filter Preferences - finding them again isn't hard.
nitrox wrote:Btw, It would be nice if you could add an option to let user know that they have acceptable ads turned on when they use adblock plus issue reporter to report that they see ads.
Yes, I think that some special treatment for this subscription in the issue reporter would be nice. But I'm not quite sure what's the best way to do it - a straightforward warning wouldn't do any good right now (people reporting "ad not blocked" will usually still do that because ads are actually not blocked, not because these ads are whitelisted). Anyway, for now we have the option to communicate back by setting status on the reports.
MadMax wrote:Is this only for Firefox? I'm running the latest development/experimental for Chrome and I don't see anything like that in the configuration.
Yes, this is only Firefox for now. We want to add this feature to Chrome as well in the long term - not before the user interface has been brought on par with Firefox however.
Ares2 wrote:As visible in the above commit, $sitekey=XXXXXKEYXXXXX identifies sites by keys and verifies the valid use of the key by a signature. To make that work, the sites in question add an attribute to the html tag of a page in the form of
Code: Select all
<html data-adblockkey="XXXXXKEYXXXXX_XXXXXSIGNATUREXXXXX">
This way a bunch of sites can be whitelisted at once.
Yes, correct (I hope to document this before the release). With the one filter currently used we are indeed talking about a very large number of domain names - and the current implementation was the only feasible solution. Adding each domain name to the list individually simply wouldn't have been possible. The implementation is pretty complicated to make sure that this feature doesn't get abused - only one company can use this filter (because they have the corresponding private key) and we have a contractual agreement with them concerning how they can use it.
Transparency is important, I fully agree. The big question is how far we can go while still being taken seriously as a cooperation partner. That's something we are trying to figure out right now.
@anonymous74100: Trying to offend me in my own forum? That's the very definition of being a troll. The goal of Adblock Plus didn't change:
en/about#project. Please note that we are generally polite when communicating in this forum. We respect the people we are talking to and we swear on
constructive criticism.