Adblock Plus

This board does not have a General Discussion forum so this is the closest I could find.

Adblock plus is now useless on UsaToday.com, I tried it on Chrome and Edge and the same thing happens, the site gets grayed out and a large window appears giving you a choice of either disabling your adblocker or paying $5 a month to go with no ads. The window cannot be clicked away or gotten rid of, you either have to pay the money or live with their ads.

Viewing the site with ads is absolutely terrible. Click on a news story and check out the page that opens, there is a full size video ad that plays in the background behind the text, there is a video ad playing in the right bottom corner and when you scroll down there is another video ad playing under the first few paragraphs, and none of those can be stopped or clicked away.(sometimes the right side ad can be clicked away if the page happens to have a news video that goes with that story) Scroll down a few more paragraphs and you get still image ads and since the text is all squeezed in the center of the page you get more ads on the right side. And lets not forget the ads at bottom of page, I counted 26 ads placed in between news links.

My favorite is "Doctors are begging you to not eat this one vegetable!" click on it and its a 40 minute video to sell you pills.

Developers help!!!

Sean G

That sounds quite bad. I'd suggest reporting this issue to EasyList because they're the ones writing the rules that tell ad blockers what should be blocked. Hopefully they can help you with that problem.

It may be worth mentioning though that, due to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), usatoday.com is very clean when accessing it from Europe. Maybe you can access that page also from outside Europe by browsing to eu.usatoday.com or by using a VPN.

I get no issue using european / us ip

Here is what mine looks like:

I told devs that chrome extension is no longer blocking anything. I was using other username (keep forgeting registered e-mail/password). Anyway, the very day chrome decided all extensions should be installed through chrome store, nothing, not even youtube ads were blocked anymore. I tried with 3 different computers, all fresh install, only OS + browser + extension. Nothing were blocked. Funny thing same sites the day before google's announcement was perfect with no ads. I have found out that opera with ABP does a better job, even certain elements I have on my custom list are blocked. Here's a pic, from USA Today taken on December 30th.



So basically, either google did something with the browser to prevent adblockers, or did something with the extension so it doesn't work, I also tried uBlock with same results.

greiner wrote:That sounds quite bad. I'd suggest reporting this issue to EasyList because they're the ones writing the rules that tell ad blockers what should be blocked. Hopefully they can help you with that problem.

It may be worth mentioning though that, due to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), usatoday.com is very clean when accessing it from Europe. Maybe you can access that page also from outside Europe by browsing to eu.usatoday.com or by using a VPN.

Is it definitely an EasyList issue? Because I've found many websites are getting smarter about blocking ads - they display a window that blocks the content, forcing you to turn it off. Even if the window was blocked via the "Adblock Warning Removal List", they still use tactics such as changing the CSS to overflow:hidden so you can't scroll down the page. This makes adblockers redundant, and eventually the whole internet will be using tactics like this. The only way I'm aware to fix this is to manually inspect the page and change the CSS every time. Is there any development or extensions that are looking to automate this for users, by overwriting the CSS from a maintained list of websites?

Filter lists are not only able to hide elements on the page but they're also able to avoid the detection by websites so that such warnings aren't being shown in the first place.

That being said, Adblock Plus doesn't support applying any custom styles to websites (e.g. to reenable scrolling). This was suggested in this ticket but has never been urgent enough to act upon. However, since then we moved to a new issue tracker so feel free to suggest it again by creating an issue here and link to the old ticket for further information. That way we can start the discussion up again and reassess its importance and urgency together with filter authors.

Thanks, I'll look at adding it as a suggestion.

greiner wrote:Filter lists are not only able to hide elements on the page but they're also able to avoid the detection by websites so that such warnings aren't being shown in the first place.

If that's correct then how do websites do what I just mentioned - display a window about you having adblock enabled, forcing you to turn it off?

Chris4 wrote:If that's correct then how do websites do what I just mentioned - display a window about you having adblock enabled, forcing you to turn it off?

Usually that's because filter authors haven't been made aware of this particular site and therefore haven't worked around their detection yet.

greiner wrote:

Chris4 wrote:If that's correct then how do websites do what I just mentioned - display a window about you having adblock enabled, forcing you to turn it off?

Usually that's because filter authors haven't been made aware of this particular site and therefore haven't worked around their detection yet.

Good to know, thanks. I'll report them to Easylist.

BrunoA wrote:

Chris4 wrote:

greiner wrote:That sounds quite bad. I'd suggest reporting this issue to EasyList because they're the ones writing the rules that tell ad blockers what should be blocked. Hopefully they can help you with that problem.

It may be worth mentioning though that, due to the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), usatoday.com is very clean when accessing it from Europe. Maybe you can access that page also from outside Europe by browsing to eu.usatoday.com or by using a VPN.

Is it definitely an EasyList issue? Because I've found many websites are getting smarter about blocking ads - they display a window that blocks the content, forcing you to turn it off. Even if the window was blocked via the "Adblock Warning Removal List", they still use tactics such as changing the CSS to overflow:hidden so you can't scroll down the page. This makes adblockers redundant, and eventually the whole internet will be using tactics like this. The only way I'm aware to fix this is to manually inspect the page and change the CSS every time. Is there any development or extensions that are looking to automate this for users, by overwriting the CSS from a maintained list of websites?

Yeah, every second site ask me to turn off adblock and I have to deal with CSS.

It's crazy no one seems to be working on this major issue with adblocking. If I were a developer I'd be creating my own extension!

When chrome decided all extensions should be installed through chrome store, nothing, not even youtube ads were blocked anymore. I tried with 3 different computers, all fresh install, only OS + browser + extension, but there is still a long way to go in terms of blocking ads in the browser

If you pair ABP with NoScript the problem goes away.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... cbfeoakpjm

I consider those two extensions to be absolute necessities.

Screenshot ==> https://i.imgur.com/QbyYWD8.jpg

I did no particular extra configuring of either extension to get that result.

Passenger wrote:If you pair ABP with NoScript the problem goes away.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/deta ... cbfeoakpjm

I consider those two extensions to be absolute necessities.

Screenshot ==> https://i.imgur.com/QbyYWD8.jpg

I did no particular extra configuring of either extension to get that result.

Can you maybe explain what NoScript is? Never heard of that. Would be very helpful. And does it work well when both work at the same time? Or it just improves the pereormcane?

Yeah totally agree with you on that this forum does not have any general discussion there are many things people would like to discuss! Don't know where to ask and tell