Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cjr 814 days ago
I work on a paid screenshot api[0] where we have features to either hide these banners and overlays using css, or alternatively we run some javascript to send a click event to what we detect as the 'accept' button in order to dismiss the popups.

It's quite a painful problem and we screenshot many millions of sites a day, our success rate at detecting these is high but still not 100%.

We have gotten quite far with heuristics and are exploring whether we can get better results by training a model.

[0]:https://urlbox.com
1 comments
qwertox 814 days ago
Interesting service.

Can the API provide a custom tag, comment or ID which will then be inserted in the output? Like in JPEG EXIF, PNG also knows Metadata, PDF description, HTML meta tag?

link
cjr 814 days ago
No - we don't currently support this feature as nobody has asked for it so far :)

You could append a new meta tag by running some custom JS to add it, but we don't modify exif, metadata or pdf description at the moment.

link