What am I doing wrong at distrowatch.com et. al.

FuturePerfect · Post by **FuturePerfect** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 7:43 pm

I think I must have reset a filter incorrectly globally or for distrowatch.com as I can not make ads disappear on distrowatch AND the little "image" tab does not appear there for flash ads OR on any other site for me now either.

Specifically, I looked at Opera 9.5 that showed all ads on distrowatch. When I right clicked and selected "Block Content..." and clicked on the button that appeared labeled "Details...", I saw Opera was set to block using these two entries:

http://distrowatch.com/images/*
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/*

Sure enough, when I agreed and clicked on the button "Done", all the ads were blocked.

But when in Firefox 3 and Adblock Plus I selected "Open blockable items", and made the above entries, the ads still appeared, even after a refresh.

Questions:

1) Why is the blocking tab not appearing for my flash ads?

2) What did I do to mess up ad blocking on Distrowatch?

Note that, thanks to this Forum, I removed Filterset G enties under "Advertisement filters", am subscribing to the EasyList (USA) filter only, and am using Adblock Plus version 0.7.5.5

Thanks for any help you can provide to help me fix these problems.

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 8:55 pm

You didn't accidently write an "exception rule" by any chance did you? It would start with "@@" and is green in the "Blockable items" list.

The EasyLists are fine from what I can see.

FuturePerfect · Post by **FuturePerfect** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 10:32 pm

Thanks for the reply.

I did not write these as exception rules on the Blockable items, but these entries did appear to be in the Preferences Exception rules, so I removed them there but no change.

Think I'll just uninstall Adblock Plus and try installing again, unless anyone has any other ideas.

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Tue Jul 01, 2008 11:34 pm

Did you select "OK" or "APPLY" after the entries were made? ... you have to do that y'know.

FuturePerfect · Post by **FuturePerfect** » Wed Jul 02, 2008 1:32 am

Thanks again for responding. Yes, I clicked OK or Apply--thank you for reminding me.

However, I solved the problem by just clicking on Adblock Preferences then clicking on "Add Filter" at the top and typing in manually each of the strings in my original posting above--using OK to make sure each went in.

Even though there was already a blocking of the pagead2 line script above in the filterset this wasn't producting the blocking I needed.

Specifically, when I clicked on "Open blockable items" a line showing "http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" was shown in red and a right click on it showed that I could "Edit filter in effect..." or "Add exception rule for item..." AND the blocking rule specifically was "http://pagead2.$~other,~object-subrequest". But this was not blocking the ads and is all greek to me anyway.

For whatever reason, my solution works, although I can't see the Distrowatch logo, which I can live with

Hopefully I can figure out how to block any Flash or Java that gets through the filterset--by using "Open blockable items" since my Java and Flash tabs don't appear even though I have checked by "Options" to "Show tabs on Flash and Java".

Thanks again for your help.