Pop-up ads nowadays

Me too.

I think it's quite legitimate for sites to either block adblockers or push towards a subscription. After all, content isn't usually free to create so has to be paid for. However, if the site content is worth it, I will pay a subscription, but if they block adblockers, I will manage without the site. There aren't many sites I want badly enough to be willing to pay a subscription.

Agreed.

Although there's only one site I've actually paid for (NexusMods)

I tend to mentally filter pop-ups anyway (the ones which get past ABP), just click the X without reading them!
 
safari and Adguard browser extension is a perfect combo.
At the moment. But it's an arms race, with advertisers trying to defeat blockers, and blockers trying to defeat anti-blocking steps. Once any given solution gets enough users to make a difference, it becomes a target for defeating by the other side. Ad nauseum.

I use blockers. On principle, for a few sites I'd cheerfully pay for no-ad access. But most sites I don't want access to badly enough to be prepared to put up with either pop-ups, or visually intrusive ads, especially those with either distracting animation or intrusive sound. There's an etiquette involved, and if advertising gets too intrusive, I'd rather just avoid the site altogether.

Sites like those newspapers and magazines that use paywalls, that's fair enough. I do subscribe to the economist, just as I subscribed to the printed version for years. Likewise for the FT. Others, like certain broadsheets, I just don't go there at all because they're not worth the subscription, to me, for the occasional access.

If a subscription is free, for limited access, but requires email registration then I might register but with an email address I can access, but rarely do. I certainly wouldn't use an email address I regularly check, either personal or businsss, for such sites. I'd be surprised if anyone does in these spam-filled days.

It does seem to me that very few publishers have yet solved the internet conundrum of most users expecting the world, for free. The answer is to have content people want, can't get elsewhere, are prepared to pay for and then have tight paywalls. The trick is in having unique content worth paying for. Few sites meet that. Most are very humdrum, because unique and pay-worthy content is hard and expensive to do. So they rely on ads that drive users nuts.
 
I use blockers. On principle, for a few sites I'd cheerfully pay for no-ad access. But most sites I don't want access to badly enough to be prepared to put up with either pop-ups, or visually intrusive ads, especially those with either distracting animation or intrusive sound. There's an etiquette involved, and if advertising gets too intrusive, I'd rather just avoid the site altogether.

Haha, yup, there's a fine line between ads which are easy to ignore, and ones which cross the line... It was actually youtube with the unskippable 30 second adverts that finally made me install ABP. I didn't mind the ones you can skip after 5 seconds, but I'm not watching the same 30 second advert over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to watch a load of 10-20 second videos!
 
Many of them are JavaScript based so just turning that off can help. Obviously it's not much use for some things as it breaks a lot of web pages, but it does get past many of the "pay us now you've read x pages" ones.

This is the only guaranteed solution for the kind of popups the OP is talking about. Helps a lot when browsing with a slow machine too (I have js disabled on my netbook for example). Unfortunately it breaks many, many websites these days. Incredible how much CPU time is tied up in parsing js.
 
I cant stand pop ups, as a webmaster myself I would never use them on any of my sites, they force people to use ad blockers and thus webmasters make less money. :mad:
 
+1 for Ublock.

There are a lot of sites detecting AdBlock now.

I've just installed Ublock and if you encounter an anti-Adblock site, click Edit and you can select the custom element to block.
 
Forbes and the Guardian(?) have stopped me reading their sites because of my adblocker.


Guess I'll just not go there anymore.


Your move Forbes.
 
Some sites have a popup/overlay thing to say "remove adblocker then you can continue". Depending on how it's done, you can delete the element in the inspector to gain access to the site behind it.

Or as someone said earlier, get that element blocked if it's a site you visit regularly :p.

Some sites also modify their forms if you have ad-blocker, i.e. disallow you to click a button. Can edit it though to allow you access if you have some javascript knowledge.
 
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I actually try to avoid blocking ads, etc. to much, but way to many pages of late are just ridiculously loaded up with them to the point performance and/or navigation suffers if you don't block a certain amount :(
My main reason, that and I hate flashing adverts and adverts that are made to look like actual content on the site.

I use ublock and don't see too many of these adverts.
 
...
e.g. Forbes won't let you access their site. The Guardian tries to guilt you into paying, etc.

Forbes and the Guardian(?) have stopped me reading their sites because of my adblocker. ...

It's actually pretty simple to block Forbes' ads and still have the website function perfectly fine. Install uBlock Origin with the anti-ad-blocking rules and the website will work great again... just like this:

3vf1dN5.png


Wonder if pi-hole can block them.

https://pi-hole.net/[url][/QUOTE] ...lex filtering in JavaScript and the HTML DOM.
 
Forbes and the Guardian(?) have stopped me reading their sites because of my adblocker.


Guess I'll just not go there anymore.


Your move Forbes.

Funny really as the Guardian app is free on most platforms and only has one add per article you can just scroll past.
 
They are looking to enforce the disabling of adblockers on our news websites to increase saleable traffic. Ie "disable your ad blocker to continue to the site". I think a more polite "please disable your ad blocker because ads pay for the content you like to read: no ads, no content"

People who moan about reasonable and unintrusive ads are tools who expect everything to be free, including the labours of others. Pop ups and the like can die a horrible death though
 
They are looking to enforce the disabling of adblockers on our news websites to increase saleable traffic. Ie "disable your ad blocker to continue to the site". I think a more polite "please disable your ad blocker because ads pay for the content you like to read: no ads, no content"
...

One such technique is to generate a full sized splash screen that is randomly named and randomly located within the DOM. Just doing that can make it really hard for someone to write a rule to remove it with any ad-blocking extension. Someone can of course look at the JavaScript source code to try to figure out how to block that logic, but then you can also minify the JS and use something like webpack to combine all your JS into one file to further obfuscate it.

www.sc2casts.com does something like this and it's really annoying! I have resorted to simply disabling JavaScript on the website just so that the splash screen doesn't appear, but that won't work for websites that rely very heavily on JavaScript. In doing so, the user will be breaking the functionality of the website, which defeats the whole purpose.
 
I run two browsers for this reason, and because adblockers can't do squat about JavaScript code.

FF with NoScript for Google search leading to websites I don't know.

Chrome with PrivacyBadger/Adblock/whatever for YouTube, here, etc, etc.

But yeah, Firefox with NoScript is a lot of work because it blocks everything, and you have to white-list a lot of stuff to get sites working properly.

These days I generally stay away from sites that need JavaScript to work at all. Just find somewhere else if you can.
 
Even with the IE blocker on, some still get through. Local newspaper sites seem the worst offenders, as do most gaming "tip" sites. The other big annoyance (IMHO) is sites with embedded content which effectively stop you using the back button to return to Google (or wherever else you came from).
 
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