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Comment by patd | Hacker News Reader

Shameless plug: I'm building BlockedBy.com, a tool to monitor adblock rules that start blocking your content. Adding them is very quick but removing them isn't and you start getting a lot of complains from your users.

I've had the issue at one of my projects where an overly broad rule blocked all my images.

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That's technologically cool, but isn't "switch from adblock to uMatrix" a more direct and comprehensive solution?

The target audience is website owners.

If my users are all using list based blockers (adblock, uBlock, mobiles, proxies, ...) and those lists block my content, I'd like to know quickly so I can appeal to the list maintainers.

Even in the rare instance you convince a list maintainer, forking a list is trivial. If your content is being blocked, stop tracking your users.

What if it's a false positive due to overly-broad heuristics? For example, try looking at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ads with Adblock enabled. It shows a blank page for me. (Actually I just wanted to see whether "ads" might have a different meaning in another language.)

I've been noticing this a lot more lately. Lots of websites have broken elements from my adblocker. I have to turn it off and reload the page to get those elements to load. A lot of the time they aren't even close to ads, it's like a drop down menu or button that doesn't render.

Though false positives happen, an ad can also contain the code for another part of the site. Most common is a site using some kind of Google script that could be an ad or tracking.

The goal of the service is not to be an anti adblock tool. It's futile and publishers I've discussed with start to realize this more and more.

The goal is to let you know if you're about to be impacted by a false positive. I've been there and it sucks as your users leave your site or contact your support team.

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