Stopping adblockers...

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jason
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Post by jason »

Waiting for wife to get done so we can go...

Yeah, I've stopped using AdBlocking software. I still dont' allow popups, but out of principle, blocking ads from sites isn't something I want to do. If a site is too littered with ads that it becomes unusable, I merely tell them about it and stop using them.

As for the game... put the flash of the game in a folder that says something like /ads/ or something like that, something that matches the default setting of the Ad Blocking plugin. This won't prevent people from playing the game, but it will hinder them.
jason
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Posts: 1767
Joined: Thu Apr 18, 2002 3:14 pm
Location: Montreal, CA
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Post by jason »

To go further, you can just use this solution I whipped up.

http://hnjdev.com/test/testing.html
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The Phoenix
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Re: Stopping adblockers...

Post by The Phoenix »

Mightywayne wrote:It has come to my attention scumware is getting pretty popular. A more specific scumware would be "Ad Block Plus".
Thats not scumware. Thats software allowing users to control their experience.

You are putting up a billboard, and people drive by. You do not have the right to force people to look at it. You can ask, you can hope, you can even have a topless woman standing under it. But the choice to look or not is not yours to make.

Thats all adblocking software does - allows me to *codify* that I do not want to see ads. Now, to be fair, you also have every right to not allow me on your site if I won't view ads.
Mightywayne wrote:So! I'm wondering how I could put up a protection against people who block the ads that I put on my website. I'm *completely* stumped.
First, lets understand the issues. Mozilla has Adblock plus. Opera has user-specified blocking. IE7 now has pop-up blocking, and with add-ons (google toolbar, maxthon, etc), can also do ad blocking. Safari has it, and even Konq has it. Thats easily 95% of browsers have the option of blocking ads.

So, you want to detect it. Some ad blockers do modify the user agent. Some don't. For those that do, all of the browsers have an option to change it, so its not reliable.

So we can't reliably detect by browser type, or by user agent. We can send the image from the same domain as the 'cool' content, and see if its received. However, some ad blockers (notably Firefox's Adblock plus) are smart enough to allow users to download the content (which means it shows as received), but not display it.

And that is precisely where the game ends. Any user can use a hosts file, a proxy, or a adblock-like system that will remove the content from display after downloading (but before showing it to the user).

Which puts us back at my opening statement. The user has the right to ignore the classified ads in the newspaper, has the right to fast forward through commercials, has the right to not walk in the movie until the ads are done - and nothing can reliably be done to change that.

The fact that you'd like to suggests that you might not have considered USERS enough.

Would you want someone to hold your eyes open during commercials on network TV? Even while you scream "DO NOT WANT!"?

Because its the *exact same thing*.
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