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Move Along, There's Nothing To Read Here

Just letting anyone who may not be aware know, AdBlock Plus is now letting businesses pay to get their ads through the blocker by adding them to a whitelist.  They say they're only allowing ads that are non-invasive, so ads that don't pop up, slide out in your way or have audio when you didn't ask for it, so take that as you will.  I'm not sure if you can simply ignore this whitelist.  But at this point over 300 businesses are on it now, so the AdBlock software is pretty much moot.

Adblock Edge is what I've been using lately.  It's more lightweight than ABP has become and they haven't tried to sell out (yet).

Here's the story about it, guys.

So this has apparently been going on since 2011, but the only ones required to pay are the really big companies out there.  Huh.

Nah, nevermind, my bad.  Apparently a number of people believe I'm wrong, ABP has been doing this since their conception and I just don't pay attention when I install things, so nevermind.  Use what things you want to use, enjoy them to the fullest.  I've got too much work to do to keep arguing with people over mundane things.  I thought I was being helpful.

Viewed:	465 times
Added:	9 years, 2 months ago 04 Feb 2015 21:41 CET

18 Comments on this Journal

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fluffdance

9 years, 2 months ago

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It's been that way for ages. Go into the settings; there's an option to disable that.

Weaselgrease

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ fluffdance

From what I remember the whitelist was intended for your use, not the businesses. ;)

fluffdance

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ Weaselgrease

http://chubbypaw.com/tempuploads/abp.png The option has been there for quite some time. At the moment, it's the same whitelist. If that changes in the future, then I'll be a bit concerned. ;-)

Weaselgrease

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ fluffdance

Read the link I added to the journal.

dahan

9 years, 2 months ago

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Is this something recent? I don't see anything on their website about it. They do have an "Acceptable Ads" whitelist, but that's been around for a long time, and advertisers don't pay to get on it; they just submit their ad for review. If you want to block the "acceptable" ones, you disable the whitelist easily--the checkbox is on the main Filter Preferences window.

Weaselgrease

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ dahan

Read the link I added to the journal.

ShySketch

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ Weaselgrease

"To block all ads, Adblock users must go into the software settings and configure them to the strictest options possible."

"The "acceptable ads" program has been running since 2011, and Business Insider has reported about it before, but this is the first time we have gotten an insight into how much companies are paying to be included in it."

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-microsoft-amazon...

Nothing has changed with it since 2011. The article uses a clickbait title to mislead people into thinking that ABP has changed, which it has not.

Weaselgrease

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ ShySketch

They left out the 'since 2011' part from the title, yeah. What it does do, though, is bring the fact to light. I haven't used ABP since about a year ago, myself, mostly because of resource usage.

dahan

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ Weaselgrease

It confirms that it's talking about the old "acceptable ads" thing that has been around for years, which as has been mentioned, is easy to disable if you want. However, even without it disabled, I disagree with your conclusion that "But at this point over 300 businesses are on it now, so the AdBlock software is pretty much moot." It's still working fine for me; I haven't noticed any ads, and if there are in facts ads being shown, they're not catching my eye, so they're doing a good job at only whitelisting the non-invasive ones.

Weaselgrease

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ dahan

As I mentioned, I don't use AdBlock Plus because it was too resource intensive, not because it wasn't blocking ads. It would hang for me or eat up unnecessary amounts of RAM. But since they've had a very large increase since the start of 2014 in whitelisted businesses (from 78 to over 300), it became a topic on tech news so I figured I'd mention it to those who usually install their choice of browser and AdBlock pretty much instinctively without knowing that there even is a checkbox for that.

What AdBlock is doing isn't inherently 'bad'. They've effectively rewritten the standard for acceptable advertising on the internet. By charging big businesses for ad space. And by making it a requirement that applicants meet certain criteria with their ads. But at this point the premise that they block all ads is misleading. Why is it so difficult to ask the user on install if they want to enable those particular ads? It's not too different from Flash trying to get you to install McAfee or some Microsoft product trying to get you to use Bing as the default search engine on install. But because they don't ask, I can only assume that it's because they don't want to be outted about the fact that they're allowing certain ads through at all.

dahan

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ Weaselgrease

"	Weaselgrease wrote:
	But because they don't ask, I can only assume that it's because they don't want to be outted about the fact that they're allowing certain ads through at all.

They don't explicitly ask, but when you say "they don't want to be outed", you make it sound like they're trying to hide something, which they definitely aren't. Their web page makes it very clear; above the download button, there's a checklist with three items: "Blocks banners, pop-ups and video ads - even on Facebook and YouTube", "Unobtrusive ads aren't being blocked in order to support websites (configurable)", and "It's free!". I think that makes it pretty prominent that not all ads are blocked.

Then when you actually install it, the first page you see has "Adblock Plus has been installed" followed immediately by a paragraph that explains their policy in a bit more detail. The paragraph ends with, "If you still want to block every ad you can disable this in a few seconds." (where "disable" is a link that opens the config panel where you can disable the whitelist).

Anyways, I'm not a huge ABP fanboy or anything, and I don't care which ad blocker you use... but I am a satisfied user, and I think you're misrepresenting what they're doing. Despite the whitelist, it blocks the ads I want to block, and they're not trying to hide the fact that there's a whitelist at all.

Weaselgrease

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ dahan

Back when I used it I didn't recall ever seeing any pages about allowing or not allowing certain content or their mission statement. They made the installation process quite simple. 'Click to install the extension, don't forget to choose your filter list in the options.', and at some point they felt so inclined to even automatically enable the easylist so you didn't even need to look at the options anymore. That was just it.

If they started being a bit more clear about what they do and how you should proceed since then, well, good on them.

Zenobius

9 years, 2 months ago

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Good to know this, I've been using ABP for ages but I've also got NoScript installed in order to block ads more efficiently.
Will take a look into Adblock Edge so thanks for the tip. ;3

PrinceLeon

9 years, 2 months ago

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thanks for the heads up

Yusufa

9 years, 2 months ago

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i dont mind seeing non invasive ads, i will only have a problem if youtube ads start popping up again

KonekoWolfBoy

9 years, 2 months ago

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There's always uBlock. http://lifehacker.com/ublock-is-a-fast-and-lightweight...

VileFiend

9 years, 2 months ago

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Ads are indeed annoying, but some sites need the revenue to stay afloat.

Weaselgrease

9 years, 2 months ago

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@ VileFiend

Unfortunately the honest ads fall victim to guilt by association just for being an ad on a website. And an innocent ad can be made offensive if handed off to an unscrupulous ad server with shady tactics. Once the ad is paid for it's no longer up to them. Like when fliers end up on your car for a nearby pizza joint. They don't necessarily know that's happening. They just paid an advertising firm. But it's still a shitty ad because of where it ended up showing to the end users, thus I would expect it to be caught by adblock. And to be on the safe side, and to avoid data mining flash ads or keylogger attempts, I might as well err on the side of caution and block them all.

I allow ads on my netbook. It runs a very lightweight flavor of Linux. You'd be surprised how many ad systems flat out don't work and claim you're running adblocking software just because flash isn't installed (aka they can't get system values that they want to sell to third parties from their flash ad engine so they rage at you for it).

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