Student trying to implement redirect for research project

Everything about using Adblock Plus on Google Chrome
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perpetualstudent
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jul 30, 2019 8:38 pm

Student trying to implement redirect for research project

Post by perpetualstudent »

Hello,

I'm a student working on a research project related to online advertising. I need to replace ads presented on pages users visit with ads served from my own experimental ad server. Rather than reinventing the wheel with ad detection code, I thought I'd start with Adblock Plus to identify the ads and present content from my ad server instead of the ad.

I understand from some reading that Adblock Plus uses a list and Chrome WebRequest to block requests to sites on the list. It's not actually "identifying" the ad, but preventing requests to the domains on the list. I also understand that there used to be functionality that would allow for the replacement of an ad with a new link, but that was removed for security reasons. Given that, I'm thinking that I may be able to get to where I need to be by replacing the request for someone on the block list with a request from my ad server rather than blocking the request altogether. But I'm not sure where/how to do that and am hoping someone would be able to point me in the right direction. Note, I'm not looking to get this functionality from the stock version - I realize that's not possible for security reasons. Rather, I'd like to create an extension using the Adblock Plus codebase as a starting point, but then modify it so it allows me to redirect. This extension would the be downloaded and used by testers who agree to use it as part of the experiment.

I did search the forum already and wasn't able to find anything that helped. Appreciate any help/suggestions that anyone can provide.
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