Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

This is the place to discuss issues with the acceptable ads list like a website no longer complying with the criteria.
Wladimir Palant

Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Wladimir Palant »

Now that the first tests of the "non-intrusive ads" feature are done we need to decide how to continue from here. There are a bunch more websites that would like to have their ads added to the "non-intrusive ads" list - but we don't want to make these decisions behind close doors. Here is the process we would like to try:
  • A company contacts Eyeo (meaning Till Faida currently) about inclusion.
  • We get the technical details, run some checks and set up an agreement.
  • The information is then posted in a moderated subforum here, for community discussion. We were thinking about a discussion period of one week, probably extended if there is a reason.
  • If issues are found with this proposal then we communicate that back to the company and probably create a new proposal later. If there are no issues then the "non-intrusive ads" list is updated.
What information should be posted to the forum? I think that it is the following:
  • Proposed filters to be added
  • A link to a test page (multiple links if necessary to explain the filters)
  • Advertising type (e.g. "text ads") and possible further restrictions as agreed on
  • Additional technical information (e.g. redirects) if any
  • Concerns if any
What feedback do we hope to get?
  • Objective criteria by which the advertising cannot count as non-intrusive
  • Technical concerns (e.g. whitelisting too much)
  • Filter improvement proposals
The idea is to build up a list with such objective criteria (our current list is nowhere near complete or detailed enough) and that changes to that list will become extremely rare soon.

I want to create a first discussion topic soon so that we can test whether/how this works. Any comments on this process, issues, suggestions?
Wladimir Palant

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Wladimir Palant »

Let's start with a controversial one: forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9282
Forum description: forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9281
anonymous74100
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Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by anonymous74100 »

Why weren't the current filters in the exception list discussed with the community :?:

What's the reasoning behind this:
Wladimir Palant wrote:What kind of comments is not welcome here?
  • Judgments made based on the company behind the ad rather than the ad itself.
:?:
Latvian List maintainer
Till
ABP CEO
Posts: 242
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Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Till »

anonymous74100 wrote:Why weren't the current filters in the exception list discussed with the community
Because it is a new idea we didn't think of before.
anonymous74100 wrote:What's the reasoning behind this:
Wladimir Palant wrote:
What kind of comments is not welcome here?
Judgments made based on the company behind the ad rather than the ad itself.
The comments should help to define additional objective criteria for acceptable ads. It doesn't help if the discussion will be just about whether people like a certain website or not.
anonymous74100
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Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by anonymous74100 »

It might not be objective, but the sites content and company's reputation should be considered when whitelisting its ads.
Latvian List maintainer
Wladimir Palant

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Wladimir Palant »

anonymous74100 wrote:It might not be objective, but the sites content and company's reputation should be considered when whitelisting its ads.
I respectfully disagree - "company's reputation" isn't a useful basis to make decisions on.
anonymous74100
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Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by anonymous74100 »

I probably should have used a different word than "reputation", but I couldn't think of one.
The thing I'm interested in is:
Would you do business with (i.e. whitelist ads for) sites/companies whose purpose is to spread hate and discrimination towards other humans? The purpose being a known fact, not rumor, FUD or similar. And irreverently if it reflects in the ads or not.
Latvian List maintainer
Wladimir Palant

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Wladimir Palant »

I wouldn't like to but that doesn't matter - we are not to play gatekeeper here, it should be the same rules for everybody. An "evil" company is something that the law should deal with, or the users (e.g. by voting with their feet). It's not up to us to decide who is "credible" enough to participate.

Now if their advertising promotes malware - that's something entirely different. But we are not going to base our decisions on whether the company supports Greenpeace or something else that isn't affecting our users directly.
calande
Posts: 11
Joined: Mon Jan 05, 2009 2:37 pm

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by calande »

The best thing to do would be to create a cooperative adblocking database because there is a number of types of ads. Not all text ads are suitable, especially those that are red, bold, size 50 in the middle of the screen and between <blink> tags. This is why decision has to be taken on a per-case basis. We have the workforce, we are numerous and we could all participate in building and maintaining such an adblock database. These are ideas for the database structure:

User account
- username/password
- log
- percentage approval (% of trust from other users)


Blacklisted URLs
- site URL
- Type [ad network | widget server | social network junk widgets | stats server]
- date added
- user reporting site

Per-site CSS blocking
- site URL
- CSS rules
- Ads
- Useless content other than ads
- log (date added, date modified, changes, by what user)

daily_export_db script

There is currently still so much junk not being blocked on the web(e.g. on www.agoravox.fr). This would be a solution, and many people would happily take part. Then each end user decides what to let in: Obstrusive/Non obtrusive graphic/text ads, stats servers, social network junk widgets, AddThis junk, Twitter/Facebook junk, etc...It's the end of the one-size-fits-all solution, and it's also the end of the cat-and-mouse game 8)
What do you think?
Wladimir Palant

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Wladimir Palant »

I don't think that "let's drop this somewhat manageable approach and switch to this complicated one that nobody has time to work on let alone manage it" is a good suggestion...
Princess_Frosty
Posts: 4
Joined: Tue May 19, 2009 3:48 pm

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Princess_Frosty »

The main problems I see are:

1) Agreeing on standards, you're probably not going to get a majority agreement on specific standards by which to classify adverts, I think there needs to be some criteria by which to judge them, such as placement, number on page, size, things like that. Then let the users set controls for personal preference for what is acceptable, this way everyone can tailor their experience.

2) Feedback for the content providers - How adverts are handled is meaningless unless there is feedback on the thresholds people are willing to tolerate, ideally what needs to happen is users pick values for the criteria above and the adblock extension collects the user preferences (with their permission) and sends them back to be correlated, then passed back to content providers so they can see what the average maximum acceptable advert size is, what the average maximum size of an advert is etc.

I think that would be very powerful, especially if the default behavior is to block every ad on the page if any of the ads break the rules, this adds a huge increase in risk associated with increasing the intrusiveness. You want to create a system where adding adverts to a website is more of a tentative process and encourage content providers to actually be reasonable from the ground up and meet the users half way, rather than just doing the bare minimum by being as borderline on the standards as possible.
Altair2010

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Altair2010 »

Hello,

I search a place to add non-intrusive ads... perhaps add sometthing in Addblock to declare new ads.

Here is a site with ads no "too intrusive" : deezer.com

Tanks
Wladimir Palant

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Wladimir Palant »

Wladimir Palant wrote:Here is the process we would like to try:
  • A company contacts Eyeo (meaning Till Faida currently) about inclusion.
  • We get the technical details, run some checks and set up an agreement.
The important part here is that we need the owners of the website/advertising network to contact us about inclusion (contact address is acceptableads@adblockplus.org), in this case the owners of deezer.com. The link above explains why this is required.
Silico
Posts: 41
Joined: Tue Oct 18, 2011 7:31 am

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Silico »

How hard would it be to collect statistics on what fraction of users have disabled the non-intrusive ad feature?
Wladimir Palant

Re: Non-intrusive ads: getting the community involved

Post by Wladimir Palant »

You mean, without violating our privacy policy? Probably impossible. The download numbers say that roughly 25 million users have it enabled but that's only an estimate - and we have little idea about how many Adblock Plus users really are out there.
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