Website blocking me when using Adblock Plus

SkyKing · Post by **SkyKing** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 6:57 pm

All,

My apology if the answer to this question is elsewhere and I have simply overlooked it.

The Dallas- Morning- News (www.dallas----news.com) site (Please remove all hyphens - I used them to keep their staff from easily locating this post.) has recently started agressively using tools to thwart blocking ads. I tried blocking different elements and would have to turn them off because of unintended items being disabled. Now, even after white listing the site, beyond the front page nothing will stay loaded. The linked page will load and then nothing but the header and footer remains after it finishes.

If anyone can tell me how to effectively configure ABP to clean that site up I would surely appreciate it.

Best Regards,

Phil

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sat Dec 30, 2006 9:44 pm

Sounds like you have been playing with some 'element-hiding' filters? They don't whitelist.

Did you hide something there like:

Code: Select all

#div(id=primarycontainer)

...or anything like that? There are different 'containers' there for different page sections .. the one above would take out the entire main page area and only leave the header, left nav, and footer there.

SkyKing · Post by **SkyKing** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 6:54 am

rick752,

Before I got a reply I tried uninstalling ABP and then reinstalled it - with no change. I guess it kept the filters somewhere. When I went to edit the filters I also found Filterset.G entries even though I uninstalled it the other day...

Anyway, I deleted every reference I found to Dallas- News-, including "@@|http://www.dallasnews.com/" and that may have been the culprit. I have no idea how it got there, but now the pages load fine. Thanks for the tip which got me to thinking. I'm obviously pretty new to this particular feature of Firefox and could use some education... Thanks for your input.

If anyone would like a great challenge on developing some filters that would knock out all of the junk on the home page and a few of their sub-pages I'd love to have them.

Thanks again,

Phil

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 7:22 am

My 2 subscription filters knock down quite a bit there.

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 8:11 am

@SkyKing (used to love that show when I was a kid)

The best thing you can do is clean out the filters you have in the "Advertisement filters', the 'Element hiding rules', and the 'Exception rules' area that are not any of your additions. Also, you can delete any subscriptions that you no longer use.

Sounds like you've got a bit of clutter...

SkyKing · Post by **SkyKing** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 8:32 pm

Rick,

I have five total groups: Exception rules, Advertisement filters, and three new filter subscriptions (JAB Creations, EasyList and EasyElement). The Exception rules and Advertisement filters contain entries from who knows what sources, but if I deleted them all out how would I repopulate them correctly?

After installing the two lists recommended from your site I went and loaded the Dallas- News- site home page, and opened a couple of linked pages, and there is still quite a bit of crap there. The biggest problem I've found when working on trying to clean the pages up is that they somehow use the same path type entry to supply news content that that use to supply annoying stuff (i.e. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... 3hp-1.html, and even an object with the very generic path http://www.dallasnews.com/).

Another object is http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent ... p_news.swf, which is obviously a Flash object. When I click on the blockable items on current page items inconsistently get outlined with a flashing box. Why is it inconsistent? Sometimes it shows nothing, which defeats the purpose of showing you what you'd be blocking.

I guess what I'm saying is that I think that site is using some newish techniques to try to beat the guys generating ad-blocking capabilities. They totally overhauled their site about six weeks ago and that is when the problems started. So, if I could coax someone to take a good hard look at it and see if I'm right, it might lead to some countermeasures to what they've done.

Thanks,

Phil

PS As for the SkyKing thing...yeah, good show, but you date yourself if you know anything about it. LOL If you know the model or name of the plane you're REALLY dating yourself. LOL

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 8:57 pm

SkyKing wrote:Rick,

I have five total groups: Exception rules, Advertisement filters, and three new filter subscriptions (JAB Creations, EasyList and EasyElement). The Exception rules and Advertisement filters contain entries from who knows what sources, but if I deleted them all out how would I repopulate them correctly?

If you go to ABP's PREFERENCES ... go to FILTERS (on the top menu) .... "Export filters". This will export everything in the first 2 catagories into one inline text file (it only exports YOUR filters ... NOT subscriptions). Then you can clear out everything in your filter list that is not a subscription and will have a backup of all the strings that were in there (including any that you made) ... you can easily re-import that list if you even want to.

I would suggest clearing EVERYTHING out of the ABP filter area and starting with just my 2 subscriptions (with nothing else) ... that way you can see what kind of job they are doing by themselves. If all goes well, THEN add more. At least that way you have a good starting point. You can actually add some strings as you see fit right from your backup text file (just copy & paste as a new filter). My filters should do a very good job there ... they do for me.

ps: Oh yeah, Schuyler "Sky" King and his niece Penny flew around in the "Songbird" which I believe was a twin engine Cessna 310.

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sun Dec 31, 2006 9:06 pm

@SkyKing:

Besides the info above ... it could be the "Exception rules" that are giving you trouble. You obviously have whitelistings that are not part of the subscriptions.

Nabor · Post by **Nabor** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:43 pm

Now on the drago-sim.com the guy does something quit simple...

He changes the function name dynamicaly...

function call_b21f66fa61f25d76e3b740f5c5ec9398(){...
function call_28abbe45221e214b347f988bccacbcb6(){...

so the GreaseMonkey script doesn't work anymore...

But my new Script does

Code: Select all

Removed as requested by site owner

But there is another way to write the anti-blocker script, that I don't post here.
And I think, there is now way to write an anti-anti-blocker script for this last way.
Hopefully the guys is not clever enough.

ecjs · Post by **ecjs** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 7:19 pm

Nabor wrote:Hopefully the guys is not clever enough.

But he may just read it here.

Nabor · Post by **Nabor** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 8:16 pm

ecjs wrote:
Nabor wrote:Hopefully the guys is not clever enough.
But he may just read it here.

Therefore I didn't post the last and best way to write the anti-blocker script

Nabor · Post by **Nabor** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 8:19 pm

Sry but the current Version produces a JavaScript error, and thats not necessary

Code: Select all

Removed as requested by site owner

So this one is much better...

Wladimir Palant · Post by **Wladimir Palant** » Tue Jun 05, 2007 9:23 pm

The owner of drago-sim.com requested removal of the scripts above, with a pretty weak legal argumentation. However, I don't feel like getting into an argument about some crappy site. In the end I really don't care how it alienates its users. There are enough alternatives, and I encourage everybody to use them.