Do you run an AdBlocker?

englishpremier said:
whether they should have been on every EU website since 2002 but weren't until 2018 doesn't really matter in terms of the experience for users.
Just block cookies by default and let the user opt-in in an unobtrusive fashion.
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Yup i agree, cookies should be opt-in rather than opt-out* but there's plenty of folk who now think, because of the misinformation getting spread around (don't have an issue with the BBC but they did just that this morning in a report), GDPR should be scraped or watered down, which is frankly ******* moronic.

* i'm not entirely sure how you would handle "necessary" cookies, those needed for the site to work, and whether there could be a loophole due to that.
 
Brave - built in Shields... but nobody would need AdBlockers if sites were reasonable.. but they never will be as its a battle for all eternity now of Blockers vs Ads
 
GR63 said:
Brave - built in Shields... but nobody would need AdBlockers if sites were reasonable.. but they never will be as its a battle for all eternity now of Blockers vs Ads
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Yarp.

Every time I have to use incognito mode to view a site that blocks ad blockers I'm reminded of exactly why I use them, I was looking at an American news site yesterday and it had something like 10 animated adverts and at least one streamed advert. I've noticed that one or two "incognito" tabs in Chrome can rapidly use more memory than the 50 normal tabs because of the adverts etc.

The thing is, I have no real issue with static adverts as long as they don't take up huge amounts of screen space or keep expanding/contracting as you go down the page.
I understand sites need advertising to make money to keep going.

What I have always objected to is the way that many (most?) ad brokers are scum who quite happily allow anything through with no checks, and most sites either go with the scummy ad brokers, or if they go direct with the companies who place the adverts seem to go with adverts with video/sound which use up bandwidth and are incredibly distracting/annoying.

At least since flash got taken around the back of the shed and introduced to Mr Shotty i'm not dealing with advert transmitted malware every couple of weeks. My nephew used to play warcraft and it seemed all the warcraft related sites were utter cess pits for flash transmitted malware.
 
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Werewolf said:
Yarp.

Every time I have to use incognito mode to view a site that blocks ad blockers I'm reminded of exactly why I use them, I was looking at an American news site yesterday and it had something like 10 animated adverts and at least one streamed advert. I've noticed that one or two "incognito" tabs in Chrome can rapidly use more memory than the 50 normal tabs because of the adverts etc.
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Thanks for posting... I didnt know Incognito didnt use Adblocker so thats a good tip
 
GR63 said:
Must be a Brexit Bonus :(
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"What I really want to do is make privacy easy" Is that not something you want? For consumers to easily be able to "exercise privacy-friendly choices" and for it to be easier for businesses to implement/manage?

Whether he does that is another thing, but is the stated goal.
 
I'd say about 50~60% of mainstream sites are unusable without and ad blocker these days. News sites are the worst. I'd say about 80~90% are either unusable due to ads, or behind paywalls.
 
OspreyO said:
I'd say about 50~60% of mainstream sites are unusable without and ad blocker these days. News sites are the worst. I'd say about 80~90% are either unusable due to ads, or behind paywalls.
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It's almost as if they don't want you to view their content. Publishing companies seem to be the worst.

First you are greeted with a cookie popup but often rather than being able to reject all, you have to go into 'settings' which depending on the site (BBC does this for example) and take you away from the main URL. Then there might be a popup about allowing notification (why the *****) would I want a non-interactive website to give me notifications whilst I'm reading something? then you get a video ad that automatically loads and plays, distracting you from the content you are trying to read. Then to top it off a popup to join a mailing list just when you are about to leave the site.

That is four not insignificant barriers to actually consuming the content you originally went to the website to visit.
 
I don't get it either.

I actually subscribed (paid) to a main stream news paper. But after two weeks of constant email ads and email subscriptions which I didn't sign up for, I'd had enough. I cancelled it.
 
Werewolf said:
Yarp.

Every time I have to use incognito mode to view a site that blocks ad blockers I'm reminded of exactly why I use them, I was looking at an American news site yesterday and it had something like 10 animated adverts and at least one streamed advert. I've noticed that one or two "incognito" tabs in Chrome can rapidly use more memory than the 50 normal tabs because of the adverts etc.

At least since flash got taken around the back of the shed and introduced to Mr Shotty i'm not dealing with advert transmitted malware every couple of weeks. My nephew used to play warcraft and it seemed all the warcraft related sites were utter cess pits for flash transmitted malware.
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This. The malware is a real problem and the main reason I run adblock to be fair its usually the ad server thats been compromised and the site thats embedding the ad has no direct control over that. One of my favourite sites has an ad free subsciption service and during an attack of guilt I subbed to that (was very cheap and they don't bother me otherwise)
 
If I look at a website with a lot of adverts, social media add-ons etc like - https://icanhas.cheezburger.com/ - for example, it takes around 14 seconds to load the page with none of my blockers running (info from Ghostery - set to off) using an 8Mbs connection vs just 1.29 seconds to load the page with Ghostery, UBlock Origin and Firefox's own Enhanced Tracking protection all sent to On.

The time and bandwidth savings alone make having ad-blockers almost a necessity nowadays!
 
AdGuard Lifetime Family(9 devices) is on sale at stacksocial for $29.99.. I love it, especially on the phone, it blocks pretty much all in-app ads..
 
The latest thing which irritates the everliving hell out of me is when I click on a link on here fir example and it opens an article on a news site in a new tab. Then by hitting the back button it doesn't close the tab, it presents me with a banner that says "articles to see before you go" and a list of Taboola style junk.

I then get annoyed so I spam the back button and end up 13 pages in the past.

Just. ****. Off. Already :mad:
 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-60255088

Facebook's owner Meta Platforms saw its stock market value slump by more than $230bn (£169bn) on Thursday, in a record daily loss for a US firm.
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The company's share price slide saw chief executive Mark Zuckerberg's net worth fall by $31bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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Meta also warned of slowing revenue growth in the face of competition from rival platforms including TikTok and YouTube, while advertisers were also cutting spending.
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Don't be mean and laugh.

:D
 
3x Pi-hole setup on Raspberry Pis (DNS 1, 2 and 3)

I've got the following ad tracker lists added on top of the default set, to maximise the tracking and telemetry blocking. I've also installed a script to automatically update the lists so they're always current. Guide for raspberry pi below.

Need to install php first
Code: 
sudo apt install php-cli php-sqlite3 php-intl php-curl -y


Now get the script from the following website
Code: 
wget -O - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jacklul/pihole-updatelists/master/install.sh | sudo bash


Use a text editor to change the config file
Code: 
sudo nano /etc/pihole-updatelists.conf


Add the following URLs in to the indicated places
Code: 
ADLISTS_URL="https://v.firebog.net/hosts/lists.php?type=tick https://v.firebog.net/hosts/lists.php?type=nocross https://www.github.developerdan.com/hosts/lists/ads-and-tracking-extended.txt"

WHITELIST_URL="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/anudeepND/whitelist/master/domains/whitelist.txt"

REGEX_WHITELIST_URL="" BLANK

BLACKLIST_URL="" BLANK

REGEX_BLACKLIST_URL=”https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mmotti/pihole-regex/master/regex.list”


Now run the update manually
Code: 
sudo pihole-updatelists


:)
 
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