Hey guys, I post at another message board that has decided to put links to ads for a specific word. For example in this post message board would be changed into a link that would go to a message board service or something. I want to block the website that loads these links.
I am running Windows XP and use Firefox and ZoneAlarm for my browser and firewall. Is there anyway to easily block this website?
You can’t block the web site that is putting the link in the text because that’s the same web site that is giving you the text in the first place.
If all of the links go to the same web site, you can easily block that specific site by putting an entry for that web site in your hosts file and pointing it to 127.0.0.1. This address is called the loopback address, and will make any requests for that web site go to your own machine instead of going out on the internet.
Here are the sites I’ve found so far, add these to the end of your hosts file located in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc or c:\winnt\system32\drivers\etc
A caveat – on rare occasions you might find legitimate shopping sites that link to some of these and you can’t see their data. Just disable the hosts file temporarily if this happens.
Another neat thing about the “hosts” file trick - it works cross platform! All major desktop platforms (Win9X/Me/NT/XP, Mac OS 9-X, and Linux) have a hosts file or equivalent. Many people use this for general ad-blocking.
The system will consult the hosts file before asking DNS for the name when resolving domain names.
The (big) downside is that this will slow down all domain-to-IP queries, by an amount proportional to the size of the hosts file. I eventually reduced my several-hundred-line hosts file to about a half a dozen because of the irritating speed hit.
But searching inside your computer is probably faster than a query and search over a network. And if the domain is found in the HOSTS file, it avoids loading additional, external data.
You might want to check those speed tests again. In my computer, which must be the world’s oldest and slowest, using a local hosts file with 4300 entries is a godsend. Now 4.3 million entries, that might be a different story…