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Comment by patd | Hacker News Reader

I did run into the same issue as mentioned in the article and the Easylist forum is full of publishers having complaining that their site doesn't work anymore.

I started working on http://blockedby.com , a monitoring tool to warn you when a rule would impact your website.

But after contacting a few websites that did have the issue on the forum, I couldn't find any that actually wanted to prevent this. A few discussions with publishers told me that they're more interested in convincing their users to give up on ad blockers rather than face the fact that people are not going to abandon ad blockers.

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This looks interesting. We had problems with AdBlocks breaking functionality on the parts of our pages that talk about ads. Super annoying. We basically had to rename all the assets and file paths to words with no meaning.

I'll be taking a closer look at the tool.

I had an issue with this recently, where buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked.

I'm no fan of obtrusive, JavaScript laden ads, and have used adblockers myself for years, but why block "legitimate" content?

I didn't know how to get removed from the list (and assumed it wouldn't happen anyway), so changed a couple of class names and it was working again. But I don't know how long the issue was there before I realised it :/

Depending on how they're implemented, buttons linking to your Twitter and Facebook pages can double as trackers for Twitter and Facebook.

Anyway. People rarely intend to block legitimate content. At the same time, it's not always easy to tell what is and isn't legitimate when you're writing fairly general rules.

These were just:

`<a href="our_twitter_page"><img src="/img/locally_hosted_image.png"></a>`

> buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages were being blocked

Was everything hosted on your domain there? If they have images hosted by twitter/facebook that's enough for them to track users which is what these lists don't like.

Yes, they really were just:

`<a href="our_twitter_page"><img src="/img/locally_hosted_image.png"></a>`

The block rules were purely based on very generic CSS class names - I forget exactly, but something like "social-twitter", "social-facebook"

Fanboy's social list was explicitly crafted to block social media buttons a few years ago: https://www.ghacks.net/2013/07/31/how-to-configure-adblock-p...

It's now part of a bigger "annoyances" list so maybe that was included somewhere in one of the filterlists.

The name "fanboy" sounds familiar, so it might have been that.

Seems a bit heavy-handed to me personally. I absolutely want to block intrusive ads and tracking, but this was a bit OTT. It also must have been included by default with uBlock Origin, as I didn't add it myself.

My users were complaining they couldn't see some avatars on my forum. I realized it's because I generate a UUID for each upload and bucket the files into folders such that a hex ID of "ad73a7a8b9" has the URL of "/ad/ad73a7a8b9".

I realized the blunt force approach of various adblockers will block anything on "/ad/...". Some would even block "/ad...". I found that a bit annoying.

You should fix it. You would be helping in the fight against ads.

>buttons simply linking to our Twitter and Facebook pages

So, was it simple <a> elements linking to your Twitter/Facebook page?

Or was it maybe a metric ton of obfuscated JS fetched from a Twitter/Facebook CDN, that would relay every bit of data about your visitor, and as a side-effect display a button?

Nope, see my other replies - it was pure HTML, simple `a` and `img` tags, with locally hosted images. The block rules were based purely on very generic CSS class names, which is a bit silly IMO.

Buttons as in CSS stylized anchor elements point to twitter.com/whatever, or loading javascript, added dynamically, etc? Because most social media buttons have trackers, so...

Nope, I'd understand that. See my other replies - it was pure HTML, simple `a` and `img` tags, with locally hosted images. The block rules were based purely on very generic CSS class names, which is a bit silly IMO.

Sounds like it was a pattern matching issue rather than being on an actual block list.

Getting a 500 error from /start, fyi.

Fixed it

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