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Comment by IvanK_net | Hacker News Reader

I am an author of a photo editor https://www.Photopea.com .

Whenever someone reports a bug to me, I ask them if they use any site-modifying extensions. If they do, I ignore them completely, even if they wrote a long, detailed report.

Web authors make websites for standard web browsers. I do not consider a browser with site-modifying extensions to be a standard web browser, and it is not my job to test my website with all 1,000,000 extensions that exist on earth.

It all started six years ago, when my website contained <div id="ad" ... and somebody reported, that their adblock removes that element, but it is not the ad. What kind of a mental process should a brain perform to conclude, that it is a bug in a website, and not in their extension, which is supposed to remove ads.

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>I do not consider a browser with site-modifying extensions to be a standard web browser

What do you consider a standard web browser?

If someone ships a browser with Tracking Protection (like Firefox), or with NoScript preinstalled (like Tor Browser), or with another adblocker preinstalled, is that a standard browser because the user didn't modify it?

Or is it based on the number of user. Is your standard browser really just Google Chrome, because Google has a lot of marketshare?

I ask, because I looked up the statistics, and they say between 25-45% of users have an ad blocker, depending on the country.

It seems pretty unfair to ignore your users completely, even if they wrote a long, detailed report. No?

Maybe he chooses to ignore non-paying users, which is fair. Hell, ignoring any kind of user is fair. Might not be a great business strategy, but it's his site.

I think most of Photopea's users would be using the free services. I don't see why a developer would want to bend over backwards to support users who aren't paying them, aren't viewing ads to support their usage/bandwidth costs, and are having an issue due to another piece of software they have installed.

It's like emailing an email provider asking why your desktop email client is displaying emails weird.

A standard web browser is a browser, which runs a website according to web standards. If an extension e.g. replaces every image in a webpage with the image of Bill Gates, it is not a standard browser in my opinion, and users should not report it to me as a bug in my website.

The web standards leave quite a bit up to the implementation. Support for scripting is completely optional, for example; a compliant browser is not obligated to load or run your JavaScript. Or to render images, for that matter—the standards do not exclude screen readers. If your site is unusable when scripts are disabled it's your site which is non-compliant, not the user agent. On general robustness grounds you would do well to ensure that your site continues to operate properly even when third-party resources are unavailable, including Google Analytics. After all, the script could fail to load because the server is down and not because it's being blocked by an extension.

Certainly it's not a bug (on your part) that the user agent rendered the page as the user directed, but that isn't the actual complaint. The issue is that the page is over-complicated and fragile, proving unfit for purpose when faced with the slightest deviation from the default behavior of the top two or three most popular web browsers.

> I ask them if they use any site-modifying extensions. If they do, I ignore them completely, even if they wrote a long, detailed report.

Note to self, don't use Photopea due to poor customer support.

You would think the customer support would at least tell them to remove/disable the add-ons instead of ignoring them.

Yes, don't let them write a long message if you are not going to read it. At least tell people that they need to try the website without any extension before reporting any issue.

Anyway, ad blockers are standard now and they usually share the blocking lists. Supporting them is just a matter of installing uBlock Origin in the browser you use to develop.

yeah, I also noted not to use photopea, their whole argument just comes across as arrogance/laziness. If you rely on GA loading before the rest of a page can actually work, then your site is bullshit. Enforcing a users data is given to GA is bullshit.

I expect they'll get over the loss of your business

In any case, it doesn't make much sense to advertise that you purposely ignore user complaints. If you do that, then that's bad, but why wear it as a badge of honor?

Maybe he's just so sick of hearing about errors or bugs from thousands of users, he's sabotaging his own product in hopes it will just die and he can move on.

AFAIK Ivan is customer support, photopea is a one-man website, and one of the best out there.

We're talking about a checkout. We're at the end of the sales funnel, where the monetary exchange is finalized, the deal is sealed, the value delivered.

Breaking this based on an ad blocker just loses you money.

> Breaking this based on an ad blocker just loses you money.

That's false. Similar thinking to how the MPAA said that downloading a MP3 is a lost sale. There was never a sale to begin with, the user is not interested in a purchase regardless of whether the pirated content is available.

Here, the user will just go through the checkout again in a browser without ab-block or disable it. Why would they suddenly not need a power washer because they're running ad-block?

In fact, if anything, it'll train the user to disable ad-block when they're ready to checkout--from _ANY_ site since most of them are broken under ad-block.

This is so horrendously wrong. I've experienced this on many different online retailers. I don't suddenly not want/need the product, I just go elsewhere. If a physical store I go to has their checkout system go down, I'll go elsewhere. Online isn't an exception to me, prior to this article, I NEVER realized that it was a possibility that my adblock was the cause. I just went to a retailer that didn't have a broken checkout. Going elsewhere is a more simple and easy fix than troubleshooting "WTF is wrong with this site?".

This is assuming that they know the ad blocker is causing the problem. I'm just going to buy the power washer from amazon because your site's checkout is not working!

of course you are.. but when you're not, the value of using the alternative site out weights having to go through the checkout process again or a 4 second page load as someone else suggested is a deal breaker.

Considering it has been reported that over half of potential customers will abandon a purchase if a page takes over 3 seconds to load, failing to load at all suggests you'll likely get similar - if not higher - losses

https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/consumer-psychology-t...

The sales people are always on about how easily people "abandon carts" due to small friction. Lots of things people buy they a) don't need that urgently or b) can buy somewhere else. Some fan shirt off TeeSpring is very strongly in the "not urgently needed" category, your powerwasher example might very well be too and can be bought from tons of places.

This is probably true. I guess my buying impulses are tapered compared to others.

No, if I visit a site that is broken by my adblocker, or that uses recaptcha, I just never visit it again.

> What kind of a mental process should a brain perform to conclude, that it is a bug in a website, and not in their extension, which is supposed to remove ads.

For website owners who are losing revenue, the mental process is simple: "If I change this webpage I will get more sales."

I think that's a fair point of view. I use ad blockers, and if you site breaks with them, I won't use your site. If you're OK with that, I am as well.

div id="ad" but not containing an actual ad, seems like a pretty obvious unintentional overlap, and one that's not going to go away.

How difficult would it be for you to change the div name to not coincide with the characters most closely involved with one of the most contentious technologies around? And never have to deal with that potential conflict again?

> What kind of a mental process should a brain perform to conclude, that it is a bug in a website, and not in their extension, which is supposed to remove ads.

Well, if the extension looks for obvious ad-related layout, and your site just happened to use that name, then yes, you have a bug related to common usage patterns.

Even if you used the name before anything ad related, when the world changes around you, you can choose to adapt, or you can get offended and obstinate and fall further and further into a niche of your own creation.

I've run into similar things with the word ad, banner etc but they don't have to be standalone to triggers some filters, adblock is fairly dumb in that sense.

An update: almost nobody pays for Photopea, and all my reports are from users who use it for free. I fixed over 3000 issues so far, some took minutes, others took weeks: https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%...

A "popular" issue is, that people use an extension, which renames files saved by Photopea to .TXT. It is reported several times a week and every time, I tell people to disable an extension. They often argue, that it can not be caused by an extension, or even lie, that they disabled it and it did not help.

https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3246 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3227 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3194 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3187 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3116 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3110 https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3049 and so on.

> the extension "Google docs offline" was renaming files form Photopea to .TXT. You are using the same extension.

https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/2294#issuecommen...

"Google docs offline" is an official extension from google which you get prompted to install when you go to Google Drive in Chrome without the extension installed. I don't think that caused anything and it looks like there was an actual bug you had:

> There really was a bug in Photopea. If you opened a file, whose name started with a dot . , like .myfile.psd, It was always exported as .TXT_ > I have fixed this bug. You can open files with any names now, and they should be saved under the right extension.

https://github.com/photopea/photopea/issues/3116#issuecommen...

It did seem like the issue was on your end and not the extensions though.

How does having GA integrated into your sales flow prevent these situations from happening?

What is GA? I do not have any sales.

Google Analytics

> What kind of a mental process should a brain perform to conclude, that it is a bug in a website, and not in their extension, which is supposed to remove ads.

On the other hand you know how ad blocking works and if it’s not too much effort just change the class name?

If your website behaves like malware is it really the fault of antimalware software that blocks it? If there was a better way to detect malware, sure, but heuristics is the best we’ve got and they do sometimes break - if it’s not too much effort to make your website not behave like malware why not do it?

I fully agree with you about other, more intrusive site-modifying extensions, but ad-blockers are fairly lightweight and only target behavior that looks malicious, and it’s fairly easy not to trigger them.

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