[Rejected] Making ABP and sIFR work together

Various discussions related to Adblock Plus development
Wladimir Palant

Post by Wladimir Palant »

@Dr. Evil: I guess it will need at least "don't show this bar on this site". Info bars always have an icon to close them - that would be "don't whitelist anything".
steve

Re: Opinions requested: Making ABP and sIFR work together

Post by steve »

Wladimir Palant wrote:What do you think about this? Would it work, is it safe from abuse? I think that I should at least add a "same origin check" - only objects downloaded from the same domain as the site will be accepted.
how do you want to detect which object is good and which evil? as far as i have seen, they have no common scheme. or do you simply want to whitelist all objects coming from that site? if yes, then soon advertisers will use it.
example: http://www.24sata.hr/articles/view/39893/
sifr object and flash ad on top are from the same address. so you would allow both at once.


sorry, i am not able to write a pm
@mark wubben: but your friend uses sifr in his blog for titles, which are links... ( http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/ )
Wladimir Palant

Post by Wladimir Palant »

steve, the scheme is explained above. I am not detecting anything neither am I whitelisting something automatically. I am simply forwarding the site's request to the user. The user can then look whether he thinks that the site's content is in fact obscured by object tabs - and if he thinks so he will whitelist the necessary objects. That's the same thing that can be done already, yet more comfortable.
steve

Post by steve »

but this way a site could also suggest the user so view ads, or am i wrong?

what happens if the main site has style (a) but a subsite uses style (b)? Another promt?

what happens if two or more sifr styles are on a website? are the warnings shown together or one after another? if one after another are shown, this could cause confusion, since (nearly) the same alert is shown twice.

to deactivate the tab you need a reload of the page (at least at the moment). will this be changed or will the reload be forced after each whitelisting?
Wladimir Palant

Post by Wladimir Palant »

@steve: The site could suggest ads as well. But:

a) The user doesn't have to whitelist. If the site has ads he will rather block the ads, and then he won't be bothered any more. Note also that he will see the addresses of the suggestions.
b) The site can only suggest a fixed address that is loaded from its own domain - that's enough for useful content but usually not sufficient for ads. And the user can always remove the exception rule of course.

There is no prompt but only the info bar - like when you are notified that the site tries to open a popup. There is never more than one info bar, regardless of how many objects the site suggests. If you decide to whitelist you will be asked again whether you want to add the filters (it probably should be limited to five of them).

At the moment object tabs already disappear immediately when you whitelist something. They don't disappear immediately when you toggle "Show tabs on Flash and Java" option but this should change.
steve

Post by steve »

Wladimir Palant wrote:The site can only suggest a fixed address that is loaded from its own domain - that's enough for useful content but usually not sufficient for ads. And the user can always remove the exception rule of course.
Can a site suggest only a object that has been loaded or every possible address on this server?

Can a site suggest only objects ($object) or also other things (images, scripts)?

What happens with subdomains?
Example:
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wir ... id=2715767
but objects are located at http://a.abcnews.com/flash/ on other articles at http://i.abcnews.com/flash/ (perhaps there are even more locations).
Wladimir Palant

Post by Wladimir Palant »

The site can only suggest an existing object - this is about object tabs, nothing more.

Subdomains should be accepted, e.g. a story from http://abcnews.com/ would be able to suggest objects from a.abcnews.com or i.abcnews.com. But since the story is actually on http://abcnews.go.com/ I am rather inclined to say that this is bad luck for ABCNews.
steve

Post by steve »

at the moment i see no mistakes in your idea (i believe that you have already thought well about the implementation and communication between sifr.js and adblock plus).
so from the technical aspect there should be no problems.
the only difficulties could arise, when this would be widely abused or novice user would misinterpret/ignore the warning.


but i have already mentioned my personal opinion, which has not changed, some postings before.
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chewey
Posts: 501
Joined: Wed Jun 14, 2006 10:34 pm
Location: somewhere in Europe

Post by chewey »

Wladimir Palant wrote:There is no prompt but only the info bar - like when you are notified that the site tries to open a popup.
As far as I know, SeaMonkey doesn't use the info bar concept. A dialogue popup
instead sounds like a bad idea - and I'm not sure what to suggest instead.
sheepy
Posts: 147
Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:44 pm

Post by sheepy »

chewey is right about user's conditioning - most user just ignore bars until things go wrong (and in case of sIFR, never).
But given that we can't trust the content provider (how sad that is...), I think this is really the best we can do, short of making a centralised sIFR whitelist.

Actually, what about such a list?
BenoitRen

Post by BenoitRen »

As I understand it, this is all about Object Tabs showing up on sIFR objects.

Why are we thinking of opening up a potential hole in the extension just for something cosmetic? If the user doesn't like the Object Tabs, (s)he can disable them.
sheepy
Posts: 147
Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:44 pm

Post by sheepy »

You se, in a sense, sFIR is all about cosmetic...
Mav
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 14, 2007 3:55 am

Post by Mav »

I thought this thread could use a little example...

I've recently made a small site for a schoolproject, and used sifr for the first time. But I have been using adblock, and later adblock plus for a lot longer. I really like the tabs on ads. But as a webdesigner I kinda hate them. I've always been able to hide the tabs using css so far, but recent updates have changed the css again, because I can see tabs showing up on my site.

Image
(screenshots of 3 pages with sifr titles)

As you can see the tabs actually block navigation and other textual content. In the parts where there are 2 tabs visible, a sifr h2 paragraph header is below the page title. I think the tabs are placed a bit odd, you never know where they pop up. On the main header they are on the bottom of the flash object, on the h2 header on top.

Anyway, that's basically the problem for me at least. I wouldn't mind if people don't want sifr headers, they would just get the normal css headers if flash is disabled. But for those that have flash enabled, I wouldn't want them to see adblock tabs. And that goes personally for me for all sites that use sifr.

It would be great if it is somehow possible to allow sifr flash headers, without tabs. And keep the rest of flashblocking as usual. Not sure if that's gonna be easy to do, can't just allow the sifr css classes or ads are going to abuse that. But where there is a will, there's a way. :)
sheepy
Posts: 147
Joined: Sat Jun 17, 2006 8:44 pm

Post by sheepy »

But, Mav, how does ABP know whether it's a sIFR designer hiding tag for benefit of user, or an advertiser hiding tag so their Flash is harder to get rid of?

The Adblock community don't intent to deface sIFR, we just want users to be able to block Flash content, since users can't right-click on Flash and block them. (And that they're too... lazy to find other options) This is the whole reason the tab is there.

Unless this can be resolved, other solutions like server-generated gif will have a happier time in present of ABP.
Actually although this is not as easy to setup as sIFR, it is not hard to do, either.

We're combating ads, the only sure way to not get hurt is to move away from the battleground, not sticking with it...
Mav
Posts: 7
Joined: Sun Jan 14, 2007 3:55 am

Post by Mav »

Well, I did say it's not possible to just allow sifr tags or advertisers might abuse that... just that if there's a way to allow sifr somehow, that would be a nice option. I just don't know how, hehe.. maybe the devs of both sifr and abp can find a way though. Which is what this thread is for probably, I'm just adding my support/opinion to it. :)

As for the tab, I think it's nice to have a visual clickable thingy to block a particular flash item. But on some sites that actually use flash as content it looks horrible. Like in the pic above it blocks navigation, but I'll show another example of flash content usage: http://indg.nl/index.php?p=architecture&lang=en.

IMHO the tabs are too big regardless if it's sifr or not actually. Often it's blocking/overlaying on actual page content. You could argue they are optional, and users can turn it off. But that would work globally and adding a new filter to get rid of an ad gets a bit harder to do. Maybe something like a button in the toolbar that would kinda work like opera's ad blocking? (it fades the whole page greyish except for possible ads, which you can then select and they are removed/blocked). Your point of saying users are too lazy to find the other options, is a bit of a poor argument to justify tabs. They're okay-ish if it's just an ad or two, or if there's just one big flash object on a site. But there are lots of sites that use multiple flash objects for content on a single page.

Server generated gifs are just not possible for bigger websites like abcnews, it's slow and with lots of visits creates a high server load. Which is why sifr is great. Just use the usual header (or any other) element, and sifr js/flash does the work on the client side.

Don't get me wrong btw, I use abp daily and love the adblocking it can do. But it mucks up webdesigns with the tabs, be it sifr or any other flash used as normal content. I hope a better way of doing it can be found.
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