This piece feels like it wants me to be upset about the maintainers of EasyList, instead of the people that created the content which has become so toxic that people are scrambling for ways to block it.
My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.
Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.
Please.
RewriteRule "^/+new_path/+(.+)$" /advert/$1 [L]
... but that's also something they could again fix with another RewriteRule, I guess?
RewriteRule "^(.*)/+new_path/+(.+)$" $1/advert/$2 [L]
list maintainers should be responsible regression test their lists for normal content and not do dumb things
this is also a problem with bad/unscrupulous spam listings which list domains based on unsubstantiated requests, etc
I am against advertising and marketing and yet spend a considerable amount of money online, and I’m confident most of HN does the same.
If parts of your audience blocks ads then it's probably a good idea to test your web site with uBlock installed, just as you already test with Safari and MSIE.
It's specifically not a good idea to rely on the block list maintainers who will have a hard time separating earnest bug reports from all the bogus ones who think they've found a clever way to avoid blocklists.
Maybe it's good just to have a reminder that much of our infrastructure is maintained by volunteers. Sometimes important policy decisions get made by whoever showed up and started doing the work in a way that looks competent to others.
Articles are supposed to have a point, a goal, etc. The goal might be persuasive, it might be to establish facts, it might be to argue for a specific change or against one. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with what the article has laid out.
But we need something to agree or disagree with. In this case, I had no idea what the point of the article was (beyond a vague feeling that the author doesn't like EasyList).
They responded and removed amp-analytics. I'm not that impressed.
I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages.
The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav.
I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups of pages used subtly different html it was a real mess.
It took a long time for them to get all the pages replicated in a templating system to avoid seo loss.
https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148&sid=e0edf...
I wouldn't be at all surprised if AutoTrader used manual editing for everything, with no access to scriptability.
Not everyone is using jekyll or any modern stacks ... the echo chamber is strong here. I guarantee you 65% of the Internet is still being edited by hand.
My task was to move all of that into a very minimal CMS. All the content would be in flat files, and the page itself would load the header, footer, content, etc.
Because every page was different, but mostly similar, I wrote an Emacs extension that let you identify the content areas (it tried some heuristics and you could guide it) and it would do the extraction and emit the flat content file and the replacement JSP file.
What you have to realize is that many people have systems that are designed for 1 "thing" and have since "scaled" that up 1000x. People still treat their website as a directory of arbitrary HTML. People manage 1000 servers like they managed their one and only very first server. It is the natural way of growth. Engineering is figuring out when that model doesn't apply anymore, and changing it. Engineering is in short supply, however, leading to stories like mine above or the "thousands of pages" blocked by EasyList.
I once worked on a site that had over 25k pages, all hand coded HTML with Microsoft Frontpage. And all in the root folder.
Not even the owner knew how many pages there actually were.
> "It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this," said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program.
If only there were a business service that might help me navigate this perilousness of which I have just learned, so that I might better monetize.
It makes me giddy to consider how much the quality of the internet will improve when the bottom-feeders are at last excluded from it.
The same issue was seen with Spamhaus and similar IP block services for eMail spam. What were selfless intentions quickly morphed into ineffective, power-crazed gatekeepers and extortion artists that have made SMTP an unusable protocol unless you are Google or Amazon.