Adblock Plus Will Soon Block Fewer Ads

I was just greeted with a message from Adblock, that a new version has been installed and from now on it will only block intrusive adds by default, but will allow non intrusive adds through, with an option to change this behavior in the preferences. I have unchecked the box to block all non-intrusive adds for now, but over the weekend I will enable it to see what adds are let through.

 

I updated to the latest ADB+ version (2.0.1) and the Allow non-intrusive advertising option came unchecked by default:



I guess the option only comes checked by default on new clean installations.

 

Same here.

 

confirm here in XP but it checked by default in W7
weird

 

Have used Admuncher for years, works really well

 

I have Windows 7 64-bit. I think it has more to do with your Firefox profile.

 

I don't get it,could u explain ? I have W7 32bit.

 

I agree, but this is not what the ABP user survey says:

The statement "I can imagine allowing some unobtrusive ads to support free websites" answered 32.5% with "Agree", 38.4% with "Somewhat agree" and only 21% with "Disagree" (8.2% had "No opinion").

I disagree here. Wladimir didn't introduce this new strategy all of a sudden. Rather, this topic had been discussed in the ABP forum for a long time, and the user survey was conducted to quantify what the users were thinking about it. If the "Disagree" fraction had been much larger, I'm sure that this feature wouldn't have been introduced. ABP is Wladimir's baby - it's actually what he's living for. He wouldn't carelessly jeopardize its success by scaring his users away.

 

I think this is a move in the right direction.

Adverts can be essential revenue for some websites (I used to run a community website which was funded by ads and donations to pay for the hosting). It would annoy me that people are leaching off other contributions, but I never had a measurable amount of people blocking ads (below statistical error of our different anayltics tools used ) for it to be a worry (I know how to block adblock users, but rather spend my time improving the site).

It does annoys me that even some mainstream websites, have horrid adverts, start streaming video ads in, popups, screen takeovers, privacy risks etc, no wonder people want to block adverts.
Then there are the people who use screen readers, dialup where adverts either don't load or cause websites to become unusable, so website owners just have to accept that there will always be a small proportion of users who can't/won't view ads.

IMHO a blacklist of know bad advertisers would be the best approach (it seems to work for the built in website blocking of the major browsers).

Link to a very useful viewpoint about adblockers from large website owner: http://arstechnica.com/business/new...king-is-devastating-to-the-sites-you-love.ars

Cheers, Nick

 

I think that because of the intrusiveness & possible malware dangers inherent in flash ads, what happens, IMO, is that a large amount of adblocking surfers just wouldn't visit sites who block adblock users.

I think that if this new ABP policy encourages advertisers to develop non-intrusive ads it could be a good thing for the Net. I tend to agree with ABP on this (I am a little ambivalent, admittedly). I also think it's a little unfair, as some have done, to suggest Vladimir has somehow 'gone over to the dark side'.

 

Well, it's happened again. The developer couldn't resist tinkering with the interface. The new whitelist is fine with me, but why, oh why, oh why couldn't he leave the interface alone when it was perfect already.

 

I agree. It used to be fairly easy to add new lists to ABP+. I don't know when it happened, but one of the builds introduced a complicated procedure.

I used to go to -https://adblockplus.org and right-click the lists, copy and then paste them into ABP+. Now, I need to re-edit the URLs, and also to name the lists accordingly myself.

Why all this hassle?

-edit-

It's not part of experimental builds, yet. I'm using the latest Google Chrome experimental build and it's not anywhere.

 

No, it was an update, not a clean install. It happened just as I had started a new session of Firefox, the page in my attached pic showed up. The option to allow non-intrusive adds was checked by default for me. I am running windows 7 here. Maybe ABP changed the default behavior for later downloads.

 

What do you mean by it? Are you referring to the opt-out/opt-in stuff? If so, that's going to take quite a while to appear in Chrome, even in dev builds, for technical (API) reasons.

 

It shouldn't take any more time than usual, it's just removing a blacklist/adding a whitelist. We should see it in the release of Chrome 17 most likely.

 

No, at least not for Mac. My wife's just updated
and the option was checked by default.

 

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Profiles
Basically, all of your personal settings, data, and add-ons.

 

Thanks J_L for pointing out that link but I'm sure its weird behavior not in my FF profile.
I also just updated in another PC with XP Pro installed and it was checked by default

 

https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8979#p53306

 

https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads

Understandable and a move in the right direction, IMO

 

As I thought, no API changes necessary to add the whitelist - only the WebRequestAPI necessary for proper blocking.

 

but in the new adblock 2.0.1 is enough , isn't it ?

 

I've been using host files to block ads and use Hostsman to edit them. You would be amazed at the difference when you start using them. I'm no expert but what I've learned has help me many times over. Hostsman has and updater for your MVPS hosts and hp hosts (ad & tracking servers) the ad and tracking servers are updated almost daily your MVPS hosts are once a month typically. I even have my DNS set on Automatic and use the hostfiles instead. "Use your own judgment here" Just go to Google and get reams of information..

http://majorgeeks.com/HostsMan_d4592.html

http://winhelp2002.mvps.org/hosts.htm

 

@hogndog: How is this related to the things we're discussing here

 

Wladimir's Random thought on communities applies to this discussion and to community-driven projects in general.