Thing is: BB uses ad NETWORKS. They don’t sell space on their page to someone specific.
And those networks are, apparently, the stupidest entities to give money to as someone who needs to advertise something since they don’t even use vaguely localised content (read: I’m on the wrong continent to buy your shit, so stop fucking nagging).
I was pretty shocked by the handling of this.
I’m in no way against advertising, and I generally won’t block first-party ads (and wasn’t blocking ads from *.boingboing.net). I do, however, run uBlock Origin to block the ad networks and third-party tracking from Facebook and Google. The reasons for this should be obvious. I’ve been served so much malware through rogue ads on legitimate sites that use third party ad networks that third-party ad blocking should simply be seen as basic malware prevention and not a moral or economic issue. In addition, I didn’t think that BB, of all places, would be somewhere I would have to argue about turning off Facebook and Google’s tracking mechanisms.
Now, it’s one thing to tell people to pay or use an adblocker. I have paid accounts at other sides, and I’d pay a certain amount for a BB account and log in to read articles. But it’s another thing entirely to use Google Contribute as the payment mechanism, which requires you to not only be tracked by Google, but to be logged into unique and identifiable Google account while you browse. This is a privacy nightmare.
To me, BB’s Sophie’s Choice of picking tracking and insecurity versus just tracking in order to visit the site is a baffling one. BB has come out strong against both privacy and security issues in the past, and there are ways of implementing paid browsing without creating those issues for their readers, so to implement this without warning and without comment seems bizarre and ill-conceived.
I’m glad to see that the ad blocker blocker code has been turned off for now, but BB needs to step up and talk through this with us.
It would be nice if they did. Of course they don’t need to do anything, because their turf, their rules.
However, this thing is a bit more than incredible given the history of posts, so I would very much appreciate an extensive BB front-page piece about this, and a strongly moderated discussion following.
What is going on, is this an April’s fool coming a month to early or what?
We’re all on the list.
Annoying message does appear to be fully gone now, i checked. My annoyance is not that BB jumped into it but the lack of communication with the very consumers/community they rely on.
I’m happy to support the site but but come on guys… gotta work with us here.
Ditto but, confused because as others have expressed the move counters everything that been preached here. (head scratch)
Almost as if republicans suddenly proclaim in public that anal sex IS ok after all.
Right click, “block element” did away with the pop up notice. Another right click did away with the grey background, and a third killed the “nothing is clickable here” overlay. Annoying nag screen gone. (using Ublock Origin)
NB: something in that combination broke the BBS - for now I’m disabling Ublock on the BBS, when I feel like delving into nerdy shit I’ll adjust the domain settings on those custom blocking rules.
Is it still showing up for you i take it? I installed uMatrix to block the message, however this morning i tested the site by disabling it entirely and re-enabling my other ad blockers (Privacy Badger & uBlock) and the message is no longer there.
The message on Firefox was less intrusive (the yellow banner shown in screenshots posted earlier) with none of this buying an ad removal pass nonsense. So I tried using the very useful ublock element picker which adds a custom rule and blocks it once but of course reloading the page changes how it’s called and the custom rule no longer works.
I don’t see it any more either. I was surprised since it is an extreme position to take, even among less … enlightened… websites.
What is going on?
Welp, I’ve managed to pretty much break the entire internet by futzing with ublock and umatrix, and the damn thing’s gone anyways. Gaaaaah.
It’s so out of left field that if orenwolf hadn’t confirmed the use of Google Contribute code was intentional I would have assumed that BB had made some sort of accidental error with their WordPress plug-ins or some such. I’m still rather flummoxed.
Commenting to get updates on this thread mostly.
I also fail to reproduce this message.
Thanks upthread for the mention of the addon that blocks the nag messages of anti-adblock. I may also investigate a pi-hole, especially as I’m looking at moving dnsmasq to one of the pis.
Still hoping for some information on the why on this thread.
I’m not @'ing Ken, Jason, Cory and the others here because I assume there will be some discussion behind the scenes, still. But I really hope for some clarification…
Oh, you didn’t get the memo? We’re pro-capitalist now, and pro-paywall, and pro-tracking, and anti-you-managing-your-own-computer. But still in favor of cute nerdy girls with ukuleles. Oh, and there wasn’t a memo.
Is “the memo is behind a paywall” the new “beware of the leopard”?
Maybe Google offers an ad premium if you deploy their preferred ad blocking countermeasures?
Given that currently, in several discussions, public opposition to Art.13 is dismissed as (I paraphrase and summarise) ‘groups and individuals profiting from or even organised by Google and Facebook’ in the political discourse, this lack of communication seems not clever.
I’m still not disappointed enough to go fishing for the rest of my life. But see above, I would be happy to get a memo on this.
I think you’ll need to get used to more disappointment then, because I doubt we’re going to get any more explanation about this drama.
