How is this done? I can’t provide any links to examples right off, but I know I have seen it. Mostly seemed to be on porn and warez sites, if you were wondering. If you have pop-ups blocked, you get the “frame” contents of the pages (like, the top banner and left-side navigation deal) but the central frame where the page’s content should be is empty. These pages didn’t appear to be Flash, but could have been CGI or various server-generated/asp/jsp/something else pages. I have an assoc. in comp sci but in my course sched I never really got into doing server-generated pages. Anybody have any ideas?
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It’s possible that the main window loads the frameset document. The frameset document loads the navigation bar. After an onLoad event, the navigation bar creates the popup. After the onLoad event on the popup window, the reference for the content window in the frameset is changed to something that has actual content.
Ergo, if you do not complete the loading of the popup, you cannot trigger the onLoad event contained within the popup, and you cannot get it to load the content page.
Or it can be something as simple as a graphic. If the graphic in the popup doesn’t load, the site scripts can check the server logs and see if xxxx.gif was downloaded from your IP or not. If not, [n]No web page for you!**
Anti-Leech is one service I’ve seen to keep out users who block popups. You can see an example here, although this particular method is easily defeated.
Ironically, their website displayed a banner ad for popup-blocking software when I visited it.
Essentially it tells your computer to look locally (127.0.0.1) for the information (the ad usually) when your browser is loading a page. Since the ad isn’t on your computer it just gives up and displays “Page not found” instead of loading the ad from the actual server (which eats up your bandwidth).
But he says that there’s no error page–it’s a totally empty frame. Host file blocking doesn’t make empty frames.
FWIW, I’m going with Khadro’s theory, although I’d be interested to see one of these pages in action. (Of course, if it’s all porn and warez, not being able to link us is understandable. :o )
I had to look at the source to find out which adserver was associated with the site and remove it from the hosts file in order to make them happy.
I’d find the spot in the FAQ that says you have to remove any ad-blocking measures you’ve taken for the games to work, but it’s a sh*te site that relies on javascripting for navigation, and I’ve crippled java to spare myself some irritation.
If it’s the same way it was a coupla months ago, trying to start a game with their ad-server blocked results in the window opening which says “Loading game…” but with no movement at all on the progress indicator.
My WAG is there’s a little script in there that queries the adserver to verify that it has just received a request from your IP address before loading the content.
I’ll leave it for more curious Dopers to determine the specifics involved-- I’m too lazy to create an account there just for that purpose.
It seems like a more appropriate ad-blocking means (for those who have broadband and don’t care about wasting bandwidth) would be for the browser to load the “blocked” crap in the background anyway, and simply not display it.