Element Hiding - Filter Lists?

V · Post by V » Fri Apr 14, 2006 11:39 pm

I'm curious, now that element hiding has been added to Adblock Plus 0.7 (brilliant work, Wladimir), does anyone know of any filtersets out there that plan to take advantage of it and accumulate a list of obnoxious non-image ads?

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 12:50 am

Stay tuned, my friend.

(as a filter-maker)
I believe that element blocking will become the next evolution of both the ad-makers trying to get around Adblock ... and the filter-makers trying to beat it.

It's not that bad ... so far. I DO believe this will be the next phase, though.

pirlouy · Post by **pirlouy** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 12:15 pm

I think you will find more solutions with usercontent.css than with Adblock Plus 0.7...

IceDogg · Post by **IceDogg** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 8:09 pm

I like to use Stylish for this type of stuff. No offense to adblock plus, but it gives you more options as far as elements go.

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 8:27 pm

pirlouy wrote:I think you will find more solutions with usercontent.css than with Adblock Plus 0.7...

Although that's probably the better solution for more 'savvy' users, at the moment it is probably not a solution for the average web surfer. Most average users would not want to deal with a 'usercontent.css' file.

I would think that average surfers just want a simple extension that they don't have to edit. Who knows, maybe the evolution of Adblock WILL incorporate the "usercontent' file.

IceDogg · Post by **IceDogg** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 8:46 pm

That's a good point Rick, sometimes I forget not everyone wants to play around with this stuff themselfs. They just want something that works for them.

Paulfox · Post by **Paulfox** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 10:13 pm

pirlouy wrote:I think you will find more solutions with usercontent.css than with Adblock Plus 0.7...

BINGO! I agree. AdBlock Plus should BLOCK. Period. That it does, and brilliantly well -- the PREMIERE extension available for Firefox today.

However, as long as we're talking "hiding" elements from browser DISPLAY, and not blocking anything, then Stylish/userContent is better at least for me because it offers the whole ">" and subsequently "lead it to the right thing" options.

Still, Rick may be on to some "generics" which would be great - and I think in THAT case using AB+ might be a little faster and yield the same "instant on" results as Stylish offers script writers - it'll be a matter of personal choice there. For me, "adbox" and "leftadblock" and things of that nature might be better addressed with an AB+ element filter; time will tell. For right now my filters BLOCK content from many sources; element hiding is site-by-site.

We must remember that a false positive on a filter loses you some content; a false on a div element would be much harder to track down since it is NOT shown on the sidebar or hit counter. Be careful. If you think you've seen posts from frustrated "newbie/I don't want to learn anything" AB users on filters and whitelisting (a couple this week alone) - wait til they try blocking elements and run into trouble and can't even find the culprit. Yikes.

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Sat Apr 15, 2006 10:47 pm

Paulfox wrote:We must remember that a false positive on a filter loses you some content; a false on a div element would be much harder to track down since it is NOT shown on the sidebar or hit counter. Be careful. If you think you've seen posts from frustrated "newbie/I don't want to learn anything" AB users on filters and whitelisting (a couple this week alone) - wait til they try blocking elements and run into trouble and can't even find the culprit. Yikes.

Absolutely, Paulfox. I couldn't agree with you more. Ad makers and certain software generator paths and generic database paths are one thing .... but trying to block "generic' element strings would be some thing else. Div id's can be named anything that the site wants to call them. That would DEFINITELY lead to false postives.

Filters would have to be VERY site-specific for blocking ... like:
yahoo.com#div(sponseredlinks)

... (which BTW, works very well for you Yahoo news people .... shhhhhh!). The nature of the DIV name would tell you that it's probably fine and only relative to ads.

One false "general" element hide could be a one-week-explaining-on-the-forum disaster.

I agree with Paul. For the present, I only hide elements on a one-by-one basis and have NOT incorporated them into my distributed filter.

chewey · Post by **chewey** » Sun Apr 16, 2006 8:19 pm

rick752 wrote:Ad makers and certain software generator paths and generic database paths are one thing .... but trying to block "generic' element strings would be some thing else. Div id's can be named anything that the site wants to call them. That would DEFINITELY lead to false postives.

Yes, Wladimir certainly gave us a dangerous power with this feature

It is obvious one has to be very careful with this.

rick752 wrote:I only hide elements on a one-by-one basis and have NOT incorporated them into my distributed filter.

...however, I did so (this BTW helped track down http://bugzilla.mozdev.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13733), but mostly on a per-site basis - with a few exceptions very unlikely to yield false positives and in the same time being quite successful blocking ads.

I am observing those rules very closely though.

Cédric

v · Post by v » Sun Apr 16, 2006 8:34 pm

Thanks Rick, I'm interested to see what you come up with. I actually just switched to your filter list from Filterset.G and the only thing I regret is that I didn't do it sooner.

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 3:03 am

Actually, I just started building a list of element hides. It's just a test list that I will compile with as much "single string" info that I can. Then I will see how I can combine elements.

I figured that I would start with the largest, most popular sites (at least U.S. ones) first and work my way down. This list will become very large, obviously, so I think that for now the smart thing would be for someone to look down the list and find sites they use ... then copy & paste the strings they need into their OWN filter. I'm building it here:
http://mysite.verizon.net/vzeoa83f/adbl ... lement.htm

... not much here yet. Haven't had time.
I've got to find out from Vladimir when he comes back if #elements have the same 'optimization' as simple expressions do in ADP 0.7. If they do, then the size of the list shouldn't be a problem. If they don't, then copying & pasting select strings may be the way to go instead.

siegfre · Post by **siegfre** » Mon Apr 17, 2006 3:34 am

O.K. Rick752. I've been using you EasyList for quite sometime now. I just added your EasyList Element to my subscription. I'll keep any eye open for any wacky stuff

Keep up the good work.[/quote]

Anonymous Coward · Post by **Anonymous Coward** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 6:35 am

@rick752

I like the idea of putting an optional element hiding list on your website, but I would also think it would be beneficial to give users some tips in creating their own list. This would be especially usefull if #element hiding is not optimized like the simple filters are. I know I would like to start making a few element hiding filters to my list, but I don't really know where to start.

Also, is Wladimir going to add hit counts to the element hiding filters as well? It would be nice see how well these filters are actually working.

-- Arckon

rick752 · Post by **rick752** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 1:54 pm

Anonymous Coward wrote: I like the idea of putting an optional element hiding list on your website, but I would also think it would be beneficial to give users some tips in creating their own list. This would be especially usefull if #element hiding is not optimized like the simple filters are. I know I would like to start making a few element hiding filters to my list, but I don't really know where to start.
-- Arckon

Unfortunately, Arckon, element hiding takes a knowledge of HTML coding. I've been making websites for 12 years and have a knowledge of tags and descriptors for HTML. In order to element-hide, the user would have to manually parse the HTML code and look for the offending tag and tag-description .... this is even tedious for a webmaster to do.

Think of it as being even harder to find than trying to block an ad WITHOUT being able to right-click and add it ... and also WITHOUT it being in the "blockable items" list either. As least ads are only urls .... elements can be any type of html tag.

If you DO have some html understanding, I thing Wladimir has a faq somewhere for element hiding.

EDIT: MCM's ADP used to show a list of div elements in the other ADP. Unfortunately, it still was not specific about WHAT you were blocking ... you still had to manually parse the code ... and not all blockable elements are <div>.

Anonymous Coward · Post by **Anonymous Coward** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 11:56 pm

The guide is here: http://adblockplus.mozdev.org/filters.h ... hide_basic

It's actually pretty easy if you use the DOM Inspector

--V