[userbinator]

What I don't get is why something like AdBlock should even be detectable...

Incidentally, I remember reading before that Germany had the largest percentage of users using AdBlock, so it makes sense that the pushback is starting here.

[DanBC]

I don't understand it.

Someone has said that they do not view advertising. They have modified their browser to avoid ads.

A marketer choses to ignore that person's choice and choses to use tricky technical means to ignore that person's wishes in order to show an ad.

How is that in any way beneficial to the product being advertised?

I am ad tolerant (don't run ad blockers etc) but behaviour like that fills me with rage. It is exactly the same kind of attitude that said it is fine to spew email to anyone whether they want it or not.

Marketers need a code of conduct to say that this behaviour is unacceptable.

[GhotiFish]

I'm highly intolerant of ads. I have limited focus. Most of all, ads scare me. I'm afraid they may have a potentially compounding effect on the way I think.

but the default position of most people is to disregard someone's position. There is a stunningly vast portion of the population that actively assumes that everyone believes the same as they do, even if they know otherwise.

"I can't focus with the tv on" "Yes you can." turns tv louder

marketers ignoring stated positions for money is a symptom of the greater disease of people ignoring others positions.

[look_lookatme]

You should only visit sites that don't have ads, then.

[GhotiFish]

How pragmatic.

Personally, I don't see a reason why ads HAVE to be manipulative or misleading. What if it was in my own interest to see them?

Consider that I'm blocking them because I perceive them as a threat, and the fact that they can't stop me creates an incentive to reform in a positive way.

There's no reason ads can't be mutually beneficial. A company around town is looking for a programmer? Here's my resume guys! Future shop is having a clearance sale on HDD's? Let me get my coat!

You should install adblock! Increase that incentive! Why suffer ads? join me and push them towards being useful!

[chii]

> How is that in any way beneficial to the product being advertised?

it isn't. But the clients of the advertisers cannot really have a say in this - the measurements of ad effectiveness tend to be done with impressions. They are optimizing for a metric that doesn't completely align with the goals of advertising

[mistercow]

Or as stated in Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

[mason240]

You should modify your browsing habits to only include sites without ads then.

[__david__]

Should the blind modify their browsing habits to only include sites that have built in audio transcriptions?

Or, perchance, is it the right of every website viewer to consume the website in the way they deem most fit?

[mason240]

You're really going to equate your annoyance with ads with being blind?

[__david__]

They're certainly not equivalent in any human sense, but technologically they are quite similar. Good attempt at sidestepping the issue though.

[DanBC]

Personally, I do. When I see a stupid annoying ad I stop using the site and I write to them to politely let them know.

(Exception: imgur is showing some ads that launch the ap store. These ads are really freaking annoying and it feels like a bug.)

[mediumdeviation]

Why wouldn't it be detectable? Ad blockers do their job by removing elements from the page, blocking requests to URLs that match those used to serve advertisements, or a combination both, and either one of those are easily detectable by client-side JavaScript.

[userbinator]

Then perhaps a different method should be used - although removing all the stuff that makes up adverts is one way to do it (and often does make for faster page loads and lower bandwidth consumption), if the end goal is the user just doesn't want to see them, maybe that's what we should do: everything except render certain elements.

(There's also the alternative of targeting the scripts that do this; an anti-anti-adblock! Reminds me of the arms race between malware attempting to prevent itself from reverse-engineering via detecting debuggers and such, and the opponents coming up with anti-anti-debugging, leading to anti-anti-anti, and so forth...)

[mistercow]

How would you do that in a way that wouldn't be detectable to the original page? The only way I can see would be at the browser level, not the extension level.

[userbinator]

Yes, the current extension model is rather limited in that respect, but what if extensions could also interact with the renderer instead of just the page (DOM) contents? Could make for some more... extensive capabilities.

[shimfish]

I drove myself insane for a morning recently when I couldn't work out why a site of mine that had happily been working for years suddenly stopped displaying some images in the carousel. They were there in the HTML but Chrome reckoned they were zero size. Eventually, it hit me that I should try turning off adblock. Turns out, I had called the imgs containg divs "#ad1", "#ad2". "#ad3", etc were all fine for some reason.

Anyway, the point is that you could probably easily check for adblock by checking the image size of something within a div named "advert".

[psykovsky]

And you described the main reason why people who say ad blockers "protect users" are wrong. They just hide the ads, they don't block them. Better to just send to localhost all known ad network domains. There are some noce precompiled lists around the web for that exact purpose.

[slipstream-]

I once had to use a method like this to detect adblock to specificially deny a somewhat intrusive ad from being displayed, as adblock screwed it up enough that it wouldn't close.

[fizz_and_buzz]

They add a little javascript function that they call advertisment.js or something similar which just adds a div to the page (e.g.: document.write('<div id="test"></div>'); ). They then check if the div exists when the document is ready and notify the server. Adblock has a filter feature where you can enable specific javascript functions on a site, which allows you to circumvent this trick.