What Is a Dickover?
daringfireball.net
daringfireball.net
My experience was probably exactly as intended. Click on the "What is a dickover?" link trying to come up with things that it might be. And a brief moment after the page loaded (this little pause is crucial) I am hit in the face with a big annoying popup saying "This is a Dickover" followed by immediate understanding.
Now at least I know what to call it the next time I visit Substack.
So the developers and bosses all think they're doing a great job and they've got a carefully curated homepage, even though the regular users get a cloudflare captcha, then a cookie modal, then a newsletter modal, then an install-our-app modal, all blocking their access to the 'buy product' button.
I’ll admit that I definitely like collecting my paycheck much more than I worry about customer annoyance at acknowledging a cookie policy. Some hills ain't worth dying on.
Are these services necessary for a page to work? Not at all, but many businesses consider them crucial. Unprotected public forms almost immediately start getting spammed by bots, burying real, important communications from potential clients. GA offers insight into what visitors to your site are looking for, which has real business value.
I don't like it any more than you do, but I get why businesses would choose to use these. On their end, at least with reCAPTCHA, they're just trying to protect themselves from the complete shitshow that the modern web has become.
Instead we are presented with some lukewarm have it both ways BS where the only solution to truly give you safe harbor is present the cookie acknowledgment. Good corporate lawyers will demand the dickover even if you do not use cookies at all just to cover the company’s ass.
The dickover is purely spite from the websites.
No, it’s a legal CYA that provides safe harbor in case you are accused of the behavior. If a law says you need to inform, your lawyers will demand you inform even if zero cookies are used on the site.
How is not bothering to understand your business, using it as an excuse to hassle your customers in the worst way they have so far conceived and blaming a law that doesn't talk about cookie banners NOT spite?
If you are a lawyer how technically competent would you need to be to have complete assurance that your engineering team is now and always will be in full compliance to eliminate all risk to allow a lack of consent.
Or…you just drop the Ack on site and not worry over it. Thats not spite, it’s compliance convenience.
The method of compliance may may not be perfect, but it addresses the legal problem. There wouldn't be a legal issue without the law. This is not a chicken or the egg situation. No law, no need to inform even if no tracking cookies exist.
> hassle your customers in the worst way they have so far conceived
By informing and asking for a acknowledgment? That seems pretty benign compared to a ton of things I have seen over the last nearly three decades.
Repeat ad infinitum
I think you mean dickover,sir.
Each time they visit the website.
Ad infinitum.
Perhaps they don't know what a functional cookie is? Maybe the marketing vocabulary only has YES?
Doesn’t seem to be widely adopted.
Checkout is sacred. Have they not learned from their A/B testing?
Almost! Your options are "yes" and "maybe later"...
(... and "add yet another custom filter to Ublock Origin".)
Ah, rapist mentality. Once you see the pattern…
Please, leave this to the professionals.
This sounds like it would be a better implementation than 99.9% of the dickovers I encounter. Almost always, I dismiss them, then see them again in future. Sometimes with what feels like every site visit.
Cookie banners aren't a force of nature. They are required solely because you want to track people. Not tracking people? No need for a cookie banner!
Which ironically are the same tools you’d need to find out if your users are experiencing unintentional dickovers.
"And this is our design for the Dickover."
"Guys, I'm not sure we should Dickover the customers."
"You know, when you say it that way...."
Epilogue: six months later, the site is dead because they converted nobody to their newsletter.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
uBlock-Origin settings | Filters | Cookie notices
uBlock Origin and others remove the banner / consent screens fine, but it breaks functionality sometimes...
Dickover. It is called a Dickover.
However, I do appreciate white supremacist trash outing themselves in public. Get it on the record. Some of them try to hide, but: Patriot Front had a huge leak of data in 2022 (400GB).
"Patriot Front Fascist Leak Exposes Nationwide Racist Campaigns"[0]
You can download it at the following torrent address:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:2c87816e4c81990fb25bbca43dd8d578eaa55886&dn=patriotfront&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2920&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fexodus.desync.com%3A6969
I'm seeding this on a permanent basis. I have gigabit uplink. Please leach and share.
0. https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-front-fascist-leak-ex...
In the old days, JS allowed window.open() which would create a new window on the user's sceren. That naturally was abused horribly, leading to pop-up-blocker extensions and then built-in browser permissions. We need the same thing for pies/dickovers, which are at root a workaround to the presence of pop-up blocking.
My first reaction to "dickover" was that it sounded like another Marion Zimmer Bradley fantasy fiction series...
That hits way more darkly given what has come out about Marion Zimmer Bradley and her husband...
Then these are especially frustrating because I have to zoom out to find the close button. Its a chase every time, and sometimes I give up.
How are these allowed to exist when there are the EU Web Accessibility Directive ?
I keep scrolling horizontally just to read the text.
Fortunately, for those sites where either JS is required for the content or to remove the dickover, browsers still have an Inspect Element tool that makes deleting this and other annoyances not too difficult and rather cathartic.
[YES, I DO, THE IMPORTANT TRACKING ONES] [YES, I DO, ALL OF THEM] ⁿᵒ ᵃⁿᵈ ᶜˡᵒˢᵉ ᵈᶦᶜᵏᵒᵛᵉʳ
> Administrative Court (BVwG), thereby upholding a decision made by the Austrian Data Protection Authority in 2024. Specifically, the ORF must ensure that the buttons to ‘accept’ or ‘reject’ tracking cookies are designed equally so that visitors are not tricked into agreeing.
https://noyb.eu/en/noyb-success-orfat-must-correct-misleadin...
This and other bad behavior will only go away when government says, “no this is predatory and you can’t do it” instead of saying “everything is OK if the user consents to it”.
People seem to have forgotten, but cookie banners were a pest before GDPR. And newsletters and login popovers, those are GDPR?
I like to call that a mafia tactic as the framing is normally „it would be a shame if we have to sell your personal data“.
I feel bad about doing this, because surely someone somewhere is doing analytics on click data and saying: “See! There is a lot of variation in responses to this cookie choice, people are really taking them seriously, we should keep them!”
The dickover is a big, immediate distraction that you can't help but deal with.
But the dickbar is insidious because you forget it's even there. You just get used to always seeing whatever banner is there and think it's just a permenant piece of the interface and you adapt to not having 25% of your viewport.
Just for the record, the author says the exact opposite. Doesn't change your point though.
It's the first thing I did. Recommended.
I’m just kind of surprised that it works to convert people.
Or…maybe it doesn’t?
Some of these things that we have are just common practices that owners of websites do that are seemingly done automatically without much thought to the experience.
Medium forcing you to log in is too much tho.
If I get a popup, I'm pretty likely to just close the page, especially if I'm on mobile where closing them is more trouble.
In my opinion, any decent browser should make impossible both dickovers and also other related hostile actions, like the possibility for a Web page to modify the right-click menu or to prevent text selection.
Unfortunately completely disabling scripts is rarely a solution, because many sites do not work at all. But the kind of actions mentioned above never serve a useful purpose for the user, so they should be ineffective and their should be no way for the hostile site to determine whether they work or no.
Modal windows may sometimes be useful in applications that are controlled by myself, but it should always be possible to override them in externally-controlled applications, like when browsing Internet sites.
The cases when modal windows are used abusively are far more numerous than the cases when they are useful.
Perhaps there should be a way to warn the user when moving the focus from a window that is supposed to be modal, but if the user insists it should be possible to disregard that a window is intended to be modal.
Also, it should be possible for the user to move any window as desired. It should not have been possible for windows to move on their own and to prevent the user from moving them. A script should also not be able to move the mouse cursor or any other kind of cursor.
A browser must always treat a script as potentially hostile, so all these facilities that can be used by a script to mess with the browser GUI should never have existed.
``` javascript:(function()%7B let i%2C elements %3D document.querySelectorAll('body *')%3B for (i %3D 0%3B i < elements.length%3B i%2B%2B) %7B if(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'fixed' %7C%7C getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position %3D%3D%3D 'sticky')%7B elements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B %7D %7D %7D)() ```
Sometimes, this one is needed to fix scrolling after using the previous one:
``` javascript:var r="html,body{overflow:auto !important;}"; var s=document.createElement("style"); s.type="text/css"; s.appendChild(document.createTextNode(r)); document.body.appendChild(s); void 0; ```
You are almost certainly correct in saying he is using it to illustrate his point because Chrome is engineered to be part of the internet advertising complex that commits so many of these crimes against design.
[ ] Yes
[ ] Maybe later
They do not care.
[ ] Yes, and obviously I want to leave this app I like to write a review RIGHT NOW
[ ] I'm a mean bad person.
Browser personalization tools or extensions ...
A combination of User stylesheet (stylus) or User scripts (greasemonkey) -- superpowered by AI models that can let users target screen elements and shape webpage display and behavior without having to manually deal with precise DOM elements or CSS JS syntax
Best useful tweaks could become part of a curated list like uOrigin ad block lists
I usually just toggle Firefox's reading mode whenever a dickover like this pops up and they magically go away, allowing me to continue reading in peace.
Alternatively, you have another browser with javascript permanently disabled and keep it minimized in the tray, or in the background.
A lot of websites that demand subscriptions, post nagscreens or use other blocks whereby the website can be read by simply toggling off javascript.
Javascript in websites has become what corporations use to manipulate & control us and do things like post nag screens & demand subscriptions.
When I run across websites that demand javascript before they will load I just shitcan them and eliminate them from viewing forever.
e.g. science.org - linked frequently from HN and now every time I click a link to it, I’m dropped into a perfectly readable, distraction free view of the content.
They've made it useless for quick manual sharing with llm.
dickover n. : a modal panel, popover, or curtain presented by a website or app, deliberately obscuring its own content to frustrate the user with an unwanted, unnecessary, mandatory interaction
So they're popovers.
Seriously. I've never seen a popover used for any legitimate purpose. If it was the content the user wanted, you can put it in the page where it goes.
I know, I know, but it's a game site. It needs sound! [2]
[2] Damn, I just tried my site again and a recent Safari has blocked my weak attempt to force sound.
We need to define the things we hate. Give them words. Use the words as weapons.
I've been thinking about this a lot recently with "watermarks" of the statistical and non-visible kind used to track image creators. (Google embedding "this image is AI but also here's the user ID".)
I've been thinking that practice needs a new word too. It's not watermarking, it's signals-math based tracking, so maybe sigtracked.
That might not sound gross enough though.
Oh, I absolutely care about cookies and whenever I have the option I do not allow the website to place them. That said, I would much prefer an architecture where I express that once in a browser setting and the browser relays that information on to any website somewhere in the background.
Yeah, about that, news websites who want to sell me a subscription. I appreciate what you are trying to do, but can you please wait until I've read at least one or two sentences (let alone the short preview of your paywalled articles) BEFORE you dickoverslap me to consider subscribing?
By the time the thing comes up, I haven't even been able to tell whether your writer can form a coherent sentence. "Subscribe PLZ" at that point will make sure I barely even consider staying for the rest of it.
But please increase the font size.
Why would I say that in front of any female colleage or any non-technical layman? We already have a name for this and it is a "popup".
Which sounds better?
"Remove this popup" or "Remove this dickover"
Be honest.
> Be honest.
The latter definitely is the more honest answer.
This is hardly convincing. The author even describes it as a "popup" or a "popover" which is already descriptive enough without further explanation. It is just an "unwanted popup" or "unwanted popover".
The fact he brought up a definition of that word after mentioning "popover", just made the need for "d*ckover" uneccessarily redundant.
It may work with 30 people in tech, but will not work on TV. "unwanted popup" or "unwanted popover" is better to say on TV than "d*ckover".
Both of them are shorter than the "dickovers" or "clickovers" nonsense.
The derogatory term is for practices that rightfully deserve contempt.
> The derogatory term is for practices that rightfully deserve contempt.
But it doesn't mean that you should expect the layman to use it in common parlance.
Either "Unwanted popup / popover" and even "popup" / "popover" is a far sensible descriptive alternative for the layman than whatever the author is proposing.
Doubtful ... where did that odd notion spring from?
> It would even fail many profanity filters in chats and forums.
Perhaps in LDS or uber Christian pearl clutching circles, it's absolutely milquetoast in UK / AU Commonwealth English cultures.
eg: UK public broadcast TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbSqdSKaXTw
> But it doesn't mean that you should expect the layman to use it in common parlance.
I'm pretty sure that horse bolted long ago.
Searching "Dickover" all over the internet and other than Mastodon (which is heavily used by techies), and the author's blog, it is only being mentioned by techies here.
So of course, you can't ever admit you are in a tech bubble.
> Perhaps in LDS or uber Christian pearl clutching circles, it's absolutely milquetoast in UK / AU Commonwealth English cultures.
Nope. Any platform that has basic censorship tools in chats. Just search "Twitch, YouTube" profanity filter(s).
Even basic filters flags it as profanity here: [0] [1].
> I'm pretty sure that horse bolted long ago.
I'm pretty sure you clearly do not know that.
They are necessary, as in: without them the creator perhaps wouldn’t be able to justify running the website.
As long as users visit websites with poor ux and show no preference versus websites with good ux, there will reliably be websites with poor ux.
It was just fine when most websites were academic or hobby content, not businesses.