Hacker News Reader

Comment by conesus | Hacker News Reader

Adblock is the #1 culprit for bugs on NewsBlur. I get at least one report a day where some functionality is broken (sharing stories, saving stories, loading a user's feed list, etc). First thing I do now is ask them to disable Adblock.

Doesn't even matter if they've told me if they have Adblock installed. I just assume if some random functionality is broken on my single-page site, it's Adblock's fault.

I suppose I should look for a way to identify if a user is using Adblock, though I bet they've made that as difficult as possible. And if I identify a user using Adblock, I should let them know it's the cause of any bugginess.

View on HN

As an Adblock user, I always assume that any errors on any site are the result of Adblock, and my first troubleshooting step is to turn it off. It almost always is.

I use AdBlock Plus and Disconnect Me on Chrome and my first step is to whitelist the site in Disconnect Me when it fails to work correctly.

I'd recommend against this strategy, in general, why would some core functionality of a website depend on the ability to contact ad servers? Sounds like a way to pressure people into not using ad blockers, and the threat needs to be responded to (and can be responded to) by that ad block.

It's a really shitty game they are playing, because content providers can't win, but they can make the internet much worse.

My assumption was not that the site depends on contacting ad servers, but that the Adblock extension is interfering with normal browser functionality.

Adblock doesn't just block ads, it blocks based on a blacklist that sometimes is a little overzealous. For example, I could block images.yahoo.com, but that would block all images from Yahoo. Maybe that's fine, since I never go to Yahoo. Then a blog post I'm reading has a picture that is hosted at images.yahoo.com, and suddenly Adblock is hampering my viewing of a site that I want to see. I disable Adblock, find out what was being blocked and why, and edit the filters to fix that (or completely whitelist the site, if the ads are non-existant or non-intrusive).

It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be causing my issues (minor annoyances so I didn't even think to report them, as a pentadactyl and vimium user I'm used to stuff randomly breaking).

I'll have to remember to disable it on newsblur.

> I suppose I should look for a way to identify if a user is using Adblock

Some sites I visit detect that I am running Adblock and ask me nicely to disable it because they rely on advertising for revenue. I'll try to post which sites do that and maybe you can work from there.

Maybe there should be an Internet Ads Protocol RFC or some HTTP header or I don't know, something anyway...

I wrote a quick and dirty AdBlock detector a while back: https://github.com/elidickinson/ad-block-test

Haven't looked at that code in a while. It probably needs some updating, but the core idea is simple: create something that looks like an ad and then check if it's still visible.

Doesn't seem to detect ABP 2.6.4 on FF for me.

EDIT: I think it just needed the name of the dummy ad updated. Try it now: http://esd.io/blog/detecting-adblock-javascript.html

I specifically wanted a self-contained solution, but assuming your site has ads in the first place, a better approach would be to see if your actual ads are loading on the page or not. http://www.Fark.com/ does this (load the page with adblock and then wait a few seconds)

Still fails.

Huh, works with AdBlock Edge. I'll take a look tonight. Are you subscribed to the standard EasyList filter?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com