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Comment by jasonkostempski | Hacker News Reader

I really want a plug that will let me mark sites like Forbes and then decorate any links to it indicating I've already decided I don't want to go there. This way Forbes doesn't even get a +1 visit from me. I've had this thought several times over the last few months so last night I started work on a Chrome plugin that takes a regex pattern and css styles, finds the pattern in the markup and then applies the css to the first visible element containing the pattern. I'm hoping it will be useful for more than just reminding myself to not click links.

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This is possible with a custom user stylesheets and a clever CSS rule (I haven't verified this, currently on my phone):

    a[href*="forbes.com"] {
      color: red;
    }

You can make it more restrictive (e.x. match the beginning of the attribute with ^=) if this results in false positives.

If you don't just want red links you can also combine it with pseudo elements, e.x.

    a[href*="forbes.com"]:after {
      content: "[warning: forbes]"; /* or an emoji or something */
    }

Unfortunately Chrome removed user stylesheets awhile ago, but there are 3rd party extensions (Stylish etc) which fake it.

I've been using Stylebot with great success. So much so that when I visit sites on other peoples machines it takes me a minute to figure out why certain sites are so hideous

What's the advantage of Stylebot over Stylish?

I've not used Stylish, but from looking their Chrome Extension page it looks like they don't allow you to write CSS for pages, but rather apply themes that have been built for sites by third parties?

Stylebot lets me just write css, or can grab an element off the page and they give you a GUI to edit the most common style properties. The ability to just write CSS as simple as .stupid-ad { display: none; } is what I was after.

Stylish lets you write your own CSS. It doesn't give you a GUI for it, it expects you to look up the elements yourself. I have custom CSS for a number of sites, and find Stylish sufficient.

Verified, as I had the same idea earlier and have started a userstyle to alert myself when a link points to one of these anti-Adblock sites.

To anyone who wishes to do this, you can add more sites by listing them, comma-separated, except for the last entry, like so:

a[href^="siteone.com"]::after, a[href^="sitetwo.com"]::after, a[href^="sitethree.com"]::after { content: "[generic warning because multiple sites]" }

That would be useful but it almost sounds better to register the view of their landing page and then not register the view of their article. Surely they will see a widening gap over time?

>I really want a plug that will let me mark sites like Forbes and then decorate any links to it indicating I've already decided I don't want to go there. This way Forbes doesn't even get a +1 visit from me.

Host file.

forbes.com 127.0.0.1

At home I have a giant list of sites I've blocked for this.

#Requests I turn off uBlock. Doing them the courtesy of not giving them any traffic instead.

The thing is that actually is a curtesy. If you have your adblocker off, they gain nothing from having you read their article and have to pay for the bandwidth. They don't want your traffic.

which is great. the idea is not to do them a bad turn, it's just to partition them off into a "doesn't belong on my internet" bin and then let them go their own way.

Yes - and that's the point. I wasn't being sarcastic in my comment of being courteous. I have three options. Ignore their plea, disable my adblock for them, or don't visit at all. They expect me to choose option 2. Out of the other two options, I choose the more courteous one.

All it is doing is slowing their death. News which doesn't get consumed will die out.

I'm of the opinion that ad-based business models on the internet will not work much longer. I'm of the opinion that only three business models will survive the next decade:

1) Collecting and selling user data in bulk (Massive sites that have access to said data)

2) Paywalls (Most sites)

3) Donations (minority, tight knit communities)

Will the web be worse off for it? Potentially. But I see ads as extremely harmful to people and not something to be tolerated regardless of the reason. From the subtle control over peoples' psyche, serving malware, or even being straight up scams... I don't see advertisements as moral and think the world would be better off without them.

speaking of hosts file, here is a pretty good one [0]. albeit it may block more than just ads however I find its nothing I want to see anyway.

[0] http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/

You might like Steven Black's hosts file [1] which "consolidates several reputable hosts files, and merges them into a single amalgamated hosts file with duplicates removed." Sources (which can be extended easily) include: The Adaway hosts file, MVPs.org Hosts, Dan Pollock (someonewhocares.org), Malware Domain List, Peter Lowe, and Steven Black's own small list.

WestCoastJustin shared a great one-liner [2] for checking the list to make sure there were no nefarious entries; here it is without the unnecessary cat command:

  grep -v '#' steves_hosts | awk '{print $1}'| sort | uniq -c

[1] https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5264955

Awesome! Thanks for sharing!

I've tried some stuff like that but I still accidentally click the links and then get angry for a few minutes afterwards. Maybe I should work on my anger issues instead but that'll take years, if I get the extension working the way I want I expect scanning the front pages of HN and Reddit will take significantly less time and each decorated link will give me a little sense of triumph.

Yeah, work on your anger issues.

You could also just block the site with your ad blocker. uBlock Origin shows a screen telling you are about to enter a blocked site and gives you the option to unblock it temporarily.

I have wanted EXACTLY this for a long time. What I want to also block are sites that serve up crappy "suggested" content from taboola and their horrible trashcan ilk. If you value me as a visitor to your site that little then to hell with you as a website. There are plenty out there that deserve me attention much more.

Adblockers like Ublock Origin already block that Taboola/Outbrain crap. Sadly Chrome Android doesn't allow for these, so I use Firefox Android, which fully allow extensions, 95% of the time when I'm on mobile.

>What I want to also block are sites that serve up crappy "suggested" content from taboola

add this line to your host file:

0.0.0.0 taboola.com

Quick gist of the code you could drop into a chrome extension to make you confirm going to forbes.

https://gist.github.com/bcruddy/4a994621c7ba050b19ddc956769e...

What's the NPM package name?

I see what you did there...

LeechBlock for Firefox won't quite let you do that, but seems like it might do some of what you want. http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock/

I think Google experimented with black listing at some point. I remember seeing something along the lines of "no more from this website". I was very hopeful it would do exactly this, but didn't seem to do anything.

start a github repo - maybe we can help ?

I will, sometime in the next week, hold me to it. I've actually got something working. So far I've got a hardcoded list of rules and styles and it works, even if the page content changes dynamically. I have to make all changes in code and manually reload the extension every time but it's not bad since I don't need to change things often.

I used to get so annoyed with all of the expertsexchange answers that popped up on google to take you to their paywall that I put a 0.0.0.0 www.experts-exchange.com entry in my hosts file.

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