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Comment by r0h1n | Hacker News Reader

AFAIK, the checks magically disappears each time the plugin updates. Given that their primary revenue channel must be Google, which pays them to whitelist their domains [0], such behaviour is to be expected.

It's why I switched permanently to Adblock Edge.

[0] http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/5/4496852/adblock-plus-eye-go...

EDIT: Downvoting doesn't change facts, although at times we wish it did.

(a) Acceptable ads always enabled after update - https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=17198

(b) Bug in Adblock Plus for Chrome and Opera caused acceptable ads setting to be reverted - https://adblockplus.org/blog/bug-in-adblock-plus-for-chrome-...

P.S. I've faced this issue numerous times on Firefox, so it wasn't just an issue on Chrome and Opera.

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This is not a fact. This is a conspiracy theory.

Indeed there was a bug on Chrome and Opera that re-enabled Acceptable Ads during an update. And of course it is tempting to believe that this was intended, given the controversy around Acceptable Ads. But believe it or not, every release of every software has bugs. And consider the complexity of the code initializing Adblock Plus, migrating old settings, setting up default filter lists and dealing with different storage APIs for almost every browser. Also a single setting being reset during update, is not a case you easily notice during testing. So it is no surprise that a bug like that made it into the release at some point.

Beside that there are several cases where browser profiles can be corrupted. That includes browser crashes, bugs in the browser itself, unreliable storage devices and a few other cases. You will realize that users of every extension that can be configured, occasionally report that their settings had been reset. Of course that don't bothers you if you use the default settings anyway. But also there is not much extension developers can do against that.

There is no way I or you - as users - can either prove or disprove whether automatic unchecking of "allow acceptable ads" was a big or feature.

There's enough conversations on the web (and HN) on whether ABP "sold out" by white listing Google domains in return for cash. So when as a user you see a "bug" suspiciously and continously disregarding your choice of not wanting to see Google ads, the benefit of doubt ceases to rest with ABP. Especially when there are less compromised alternatives like Adblock Edge.

The real point is that ABP originally pushed an update that enabled Google Ads by default.

That's not an ad blocker. The trust is gone.

In the future they can just push more updates with new "features" enabled by default that allows more kinds of ads from their whitelist.

I've never had the whitelist checkbox revert its setting.

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