Ask HN: Blacklist Forbes?

[willwhitney]

Would it be possible to blacklist forbes.com links? They now block viewers who are using ad blockers, and have recently been serving advertising malware to visitors [1].

They also have awful interstitial ads [2] and, while they masquerade as a news organization, are actually a blog farm [3].

Blocking Forbes would be no great loss in terms of content, and would avoid a surprising amount of advertising- (and malware-) generated pain.

[1]: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware

[2]: <any Forbes article, e.g. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2016/01/08/meet-the-queen-of-imgur-the-image-sharing-site-thats-half-the-size-of-twitter/ >

[3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3zs6qk/gq_and_forbes_go_after_ad_blocker_users_rather/cyp2uls?context=3#cyowy51

[StevePerkins]

This seems to be becoming a lot more common.

Whenever I search for answers to Go-related questions, a website called "socketloop.com" is always the top search result. Although they have extraordinary SEO when it comes to serving content to Google or Bing crawlers, they don't serve traffic AT ALL to browsers with AdBlock installed.

Really frustrating... that blog site is turning into the "expertsexchange.com" of Go. I would rather just have its links excluded from my search results altogether. The crazy thing is that it's a one-man WordPress-like niche blog, for which I'd be shocked if it drew more than a few hundred bucks A YEAR in ad revenue anyway.

[shpx]

> I would rather just have its links excluded from my search results altogether

You can. Google offers a personal block list extension. For chrome at least.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

[zer]

You could also disable JavaScript for socketloop. Works fine for me.

[sologoub]

Just visited socketloop.com and seems to work fine. Using Focus by Firefox for blocking.

[malmsteen]

just press escape before it's fully loaded. Works fine with adblock + mublock

[nhebb]

There's already a built in solution for this on HN:

- Upvote posts you like.

- Do not upvote posts you don't like.

- Use 'Flag' judiciously for content that you feel is not appropriate to HN.

- Let the HN ranking algorithm do its work.

[codegeek]

I agree. Had a really shocking experience when I tried to visit a link and they kept telling me to "turn off ad blockers" to provide a better experience.

[tptacek]

I don't like Forbes and can't remember a single Forbes submission on HN that I've gotten any value from, but this is just one in a long list of sites people believe should be banned from HN for reasons other than the content that they publish.

I don't think this is a can of worms anyone really wants to open.

If you don't want to unwittingly visit Forbes, edit your /etc/hosts file.

[eli]

I'd prefer to decide for myself whether I want to click a link, thanks.

I'm sure you can find a suitable plugin or HOSTS file modification that will prevent you from accessing forbes.com even accidentally.

[kriegslustig]

Is it possible? Of course it is! From their current site I gathered these domains (these are the ones uBlock doesn't block by default):

forbes.com

forbesimg.com

forbes_video.edgesuite.net

app-ab13.marketo.com

If you're using uBlock Origin you can simply click on the uBlock-icon on the top left in your browser, click on the grey bar on top of the box that opened, go to "My Filters" and insert the above snippet into the text box.

Edit: formatting

[kiiski]

I'm pretty sure he was talking about blacklisting forbes.com links on HN.

[kriegslustig]

Oh, now that makes more sense. Sorry! Anyway blacklisting their content in the browser might be nice too.

[alexivanovs]

Seems like a VERY bold move, and something tells me that a lot of other sites are going to follow this idea, in many ways because it validates what others have been feeling already for so long; the loss of potential revenue.

I encountered this for the first time earlier today, and had to come back to the screen that tells you to turn it off at least 3 times, one can hope that it was just a 'temporary' hold to lure people in the idea, but no -- it's the real deal!

[paulus_magnus2]

To lawyers here: if my PC gets infected on Forbes, who is liable? Forbes or the AD provider or ???

[junto]

Probably should be a chain, so you sue Forbes, Forbes sues the ad network and the network sues the advertiser.

In reality, Forbes lawyers would beat you with a big stick and demonstrate that their public terms and conditions that nobody reads, absolve themselves from any responsibility!

[rubyfan]

I'm not sure I buy that having a terms page and me viewing some other page on their site constitutes an agreement that absolves Forbes.com from liability or protects them from you suing them.

[junto]

I agree with you, but their $1000 per hour lawyer probably doesn't care what we think.

[ErikVandeWater]

I believe this is an example where all parties in the chain from malware>Ad network>Forbes can be held liable. You could decide to sue any and all parties that delivered the malware /biz law 101 guess

[recursive]

I don't use an ad-blocker to avoid problems like this. Why should ad blockers be considered the default state?

[gpvos]

Things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10870892

[recursive]

Serving malware seems like a much more serious problem. That sounds like a good reason for banning by itself, regardless of what they do to ad blockers.

[gpvos]

My point is more that adblockers are a good defence against malware, so much that they can be seen as a necessity, and can therefore be treated as a reasonable default.

[greggarious]

Many websites serve malvertising, blocking Forbes would just give readers a false sense of security.

[gue5t]

Agreed. Forbes is a mainstream news source and doesn't belong on HN anyway. They don't have articles of technical substance about computer hacking.

Edit: It'd be nice if the folks downvoting would take the time to explain how they feel about this topic. Are there Forbes articles that actually pertain to the act of computer hacking, and not just modern (computerized) business?

[danbower]

I didn't downvote you but I'll give my thoughts.

Firstly there's been quite a few articles posted to HN that aren't even technology related, let alone being of proper substance, yet are still of interest to HN readers. For example I have fond memories reading through a bee keeping article posted here and the discussion that followed. Due to the popularity of that article and others like it, I think it's fair to say the readership isn't fixed on the idea that all articles must even be strictly technology related. Secondly you'll notice that BBC articles get posted here quite often and that's absolutely a mainstream news source.

[detaro]

Because HN is not (just) for articles about computer hacking.

First paragraph of the Guidelines:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

[funkyy]

I concur - as of late you can easily buy articles on Forbes decreasing its quality and neutrality.

[deusu]

I agree.

But I would go even farther. Block every site where you won't be able to read the content without having Javascript enabled. I have experienced several blogs where you won't see anything without Javascript.

[hhsnopek]

That's a little much considering all of the sites that are well beyond static content and must load using RESTful requests. This would completely removing a lot of the web. Maybe if everyone used static sites as the standard when it came to huge sites, mainly corporate; then I would agree.

All in all, blocking all sites that load their content would be insane scraping and more than a handful of problems.

[deusu]

I don't know what technology these blogs are using, but on the occasions where I looked at the HTML-source, the content was there. It just didn't show with Javascript disabled.

Yes, you can use Javascript to make things prettier. I have no problem with that. But not showing content that is actually there, that's a no-go for me.

[danmaz74]

Why should I be deprived of interesting content that requires javascript to be viewed? If you don't want javascript, it's your problem, not mine.

[ashwinb10]

Isn't this a bit extreme? Many websites use client-side rendering via frameworks like Angular, React, etc.

[currysausage]

I find it extreme if a site requires JavaScript + hundreds of kilobytes of frameworks in order to display some text. But you're right, such a measure would probably hide useful content from HN users, thus making HN itself less useful.

[adrusi]

The point is that for delivering document content like articles to browsers, client side rendering is inferior, and they should be depending on angular or react to render the content.

I do think it's a little extreme to ban sites that do this, but I also don't think that sites should do it and if banning them from HN means they won't then maybe that's not so crazy. I don't think banning them from HN will help, though.

[EvanPlaice]

This is about blocking one malicious actor.

Not going all out Richard Stallman. Everybody knows, you never go full Richard Stallman.

[pan69]

The New York Times is another one I can think of. I'm not against pay walls or ad blocking, but if, as a content provider, you choose to implement these sorts of "devices" than you can at least expect your content not to be shared around any more on link sites such as HN, i.e. you're not serving the community on those websites any more, your serving your customers. Which is fine, but I'm not your customer.

When ever I see a pay wall on HN these days, I "flag" it.

[blacksmythe]

I believe if you flag too many articles, HN takes away your flagging privilege.

[relkor]

You have to speak up, although it is a chorus of voices that is the will of the community, each voice is necessary. Do not be afraid of speaking your opinion for fear of loosing a button on the internet that you can press.

[krapp]

The mods have already made it perfectly clear[0] that paywalled articles are acceptable, though. This isn't a subject which is apparently up for debate - flagging paywalled articles is an abuse of flagging, abuse of flagging will lead to loss of flagging rights, and complaining about paywalled articles is off topic, and off topic discussion gets pruned and voted down.

If you don't like that an article is paywalled, provide a workaround link (which many such sites have, so they can still get SEO from the article) or just don't comment on that article.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

[relkor]

You are missing the point about advocating for change. Of course I am aware that mods allow pay-walled articles, I believe I saw the discussion was on the front page a month or so back. What I am talking about is civil disobedience, Rosa Parks did not move to the back of the bus even though it was the law at the time. Just because something is the rules does not mean one should not act. As I directly addressed in my comment, if you have a personal belief that certain rules are incorrect, then you should act, and not wait for someone else to go first.

[Tomte]

You're abusing the flag mechanism. Stop doing that.