Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Various discussions related to Adblock Plus development
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Guest

Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by Guest »

I think it would be a good idea to have a dedicated radio button on the first page of ABP's "Report issue on this page" feature for the reporting of sites which detect ad blocking and display nag screens accordingly.

Currently, the nag screens are only being defeated when someone comes to the forum to point one out. Streamlining the reporting procedure will allow us to defeat even more nag screens by lowering the barrier to reporting.

By defeating more nag screens, we increase the usability of ABP and protect users from the urge to disable the ad blocker as requested, exposing themselves to advertising and tracking in the process.
Wladimir Palant

Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by Wladimir Palant »

I moved that into Future development for further discussion. This sounds like something worth looking into. The main question is whether the issue is really widespread enough to justify a separate option. In general: the fewer options we offer, the smaller the chance that people will get confused and give up.
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Crits
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Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by Crits »

Actually, users are pretty keen to report anti-adblocking measures when they run into them, so I'm not sure that the fact of knowing that there is an option to flag an issue as "Anti-adblock" will directly encourage the users to report such issues.

Yet, anti-adblock issues could indeed be inserted in one of the 3 options that already exists (maybe the 1st one, which would then need some rephrasing), this way we don't increase the number of options and the user is a bit less confused when he has to choose an option to report an anti-adblock issue.
Author of Liste FR, an ad-blocking subscription for French websites
Guest

Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by Guest »

Hi!

There are some websites recognizing the ad blocker, and I guess this number will increase steadily.

My question is:
Wouldn't it be very simple to masquerade the blocking of ads?
How can a site know that the ad has been blocked, if the ad was downloaded accordingly (but not shown)? Is there a secret conspiracy of browser producers and content advertizers against the user so that the advertizer knows what content has actually be shown on the users screen? There must be a way to make the server believe that the ad was shown to the user as expected, and any way to detect that it was not would be a serious breach of privacy!

Keep on your good work & thanks!
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Crits
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Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by Crits »

Crits wrote:Yet, anti-adblock issues could indeed be inserted in one of the 3 options that already exists (maybe the 1st one, which would then need some rephrasing), this way we don't increase the number of options and the user is a bit less confused when he has to choose an option to report an anti-adblock issue.
Should actually be time to add a sentence about that. Since ABP recent democratization, the number of anti-adblocks is increasing too, and it would be helpful if more people were reporting these kind of measures. I'm pretty sure some people are willing to do so but don't actually know it's possible to circumvent anti-adblocks in most cases, thus preventing themselves from submitting an issue report.
Author of Liste FR, an ad-blocking subscription for French websites
VeeYuu

Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by VeeYuu »

Blip has recently started posting 90 sec nag screens on all of their videos when the ad is blocked.

www.blip.tv
warezok
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Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by warezok »

Dear ABP developers,

I am getting same issue too. More and more sites using anti Ad-Blocker technique as described in this site: http://www.webupd8.org/2009/07/how-to-d ... splay.html

It is pretty hard to detect automatically these checks. But would suggest to add not only white list of domains but also a specific file with wildcard. Also would be big advatage to see elements that have been blocked on current website.

I got single site where forcing me switch off ABP and adverts are really enoying and distracting so I hate them. Found quite simple solution to get round this time. Website has javascript domain.com/JS/Advertise.js which matching ABP blocking rules and script contains only single line of code: var advertise = true;. So after loading page javascript checks for this variable if have been loaded. So I found "/advertise." rule matching this criteria in ABP and had to switch it off. And it worked. I don't want to keep this rule switched off for all sites so for this reason I would recomment adding specific white list file with wildcard.

I understand that this won't be easy for regular users to find blocked element but at least for other would be ability to get rid off ads again. So idealy would be to see list of blocked elements on current site and by ticking/unticking found ABP rules validated to ignore or put it back to ignore list (add/remove from white list of files specific to current domain only).

Thanks for the greatest anti Ad software.
MonztA
ABP Developer
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Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by MonztA »

warezok wrote:So idealy would be to see list of blocked elements on current site and by ticking/unticking found ABP rules validated to ignore or put it back to ignore list (add/remove from white list of files specific to current domain only).
In the Firefox version you can already do that.

What is the site using the detection method you described?
bryan140140
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Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by bryan140140 »

how are they even able to do this anyways, is it a matter of the stream or some kind of feedback the feed gets from your computer
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Gingerbread Man
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Re: Issue Reporting - Detection of ABP

Post by Gingerbread Man »

bryan140140 wrote:how are they even able to do this anyways
JavaScript can be used to check if a given element is visible. If the ad element is not visible, then it's safe to assume some ad blocking solution is being used.
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