The ancient techno-peasant would be me, of course.
So, at the bottom of thread pages now, there’s four new icons:
Digg del.icio.us StumbleUpon Google
What do they do? why are they there?
del.icio.us and google links are the links to bookmark this page in del.icio.us or google’s online bookmarking system respectively.
the digg and stumbleupon linsk are the links to submit this thread to digg and/or stumbleupon respectively.
Any way to get rid of them (I don’t use them and it would cut down on visual clutter)?
Are they anything more than iconed links? Or do they also run code in the background collecting (anonymous or not) data on read threads?
ETA:
Looking at NoScript, it’s currently blocking:
Rubiconproject
Excelator
Cdnlayer
Quantserve
Are any of these related? What do they want to run/do?
(Should this be in ATMB?)
Well, THAT tells us a whole lot. :rolleyes:
Oh fer chrissakes …
Is del.icio.us still popular? I would think that a Facebook link would be more useful to more people.
BTW, there’s a related discussion in ATMB:
You can block them by installing the firefox addon “Remove It Permanently” (aka R.I.P., hehe). You can block ANY content on a webpage, and you can block it for the whole domain.
Although adblock is effective at removing ad content, it doesn’t always get rid of the placeholders where the ads used to be. RIP will remove the placeholders, too. For example, ads which I blocked on my gaming forum for a long time still permanently displaced a hundred pixels of valuable screen real estate. I used RIP to take away the blank space. It was good.
In backwards order:
apparently, it already is;
not that I know of (looks around suspiciously);
not seeing the “clutter” really, as it’s a single line of small icons at the very bottom of the thread, tho ymmv and all that.
Why would I want to? remember, ancient techno-peasant.
Digg is a “social news website.” You submit a news article or webpage that you find interesting, and the community votes on whether they like it or not. The stories that get the most positive response are automatically directed to the top of the front page of Digg.com. Basically, it’s meant to serve as a barometer for what millions of people find interesting at a given moment.
StumbleUpon is sort of similar. It’s a service that lets you “channel surf” the internet. You register an account, give a little bit of demographic information, and some information about your interests, and then install the toolbar. Whenever you’re bored, you can click “stumble,” and it will direct you to a random webpage that it think you might like, based on the information you provided. You can then click a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” button on the toolbar to indicate if you like or dislike what you’ve just seen, so the service can, in theory, direct you to stuff you’re more likely to enjoy.
Putting those buttons on a webpage makes it easier for people to submit that page to those services, thereby sharing it with lots of people.
Even though the questions are general ones, let’s move from GQ to ATMB, since we’re talking about things having to do with this Board.
samclem Moderator
My first thread moving! woo-hoo! I roused a moderator to take action!
thank you, SmithCommaJohn. Is del.icio.us something similar?
del.icio.us is a bookmarking and sharing service. You can bookmark the sites or items you find interesting; then, when you’re on another computer down the track, you can find it again because it’s on your del.icio.us account. You can also share your bookmarks, and it’ll collect the most popular and most recent ones on its pages.
thank you, that’s very helpful.
The stars must be right.
Those were all there before. Also, NoScript has a function where, if you middle click on site, it will take you to a page letting you get info about the site. I use the first link to decide whether I will allow a script to run.
Anyways, I’ve done this before and I can tell you about them.
[ul]
[li]Rubicon is an ad server with dubious privacy and malware records [/li][li]Excelator is a tracker that actually uses a browser exploit to get into your history (upgrade to Firefox 4 or the latest Chrome to fix)[/li][li]Cdnlayer is a content delivery service that forces the cloud to use the closest content, but has a really low rating for some reason[/li][*]Quantserve is like Google-analytics (which you apparently trust enough to enable), but provides information publicly to advertisers. In this case, it probably sends information about how many people come to this site to Rubicon, so they know how much to pay Ed. It conceivably could also be used by Addthis, the providers of the links.[/ul]
Adblock can and usually does handle that. If it messes up, just use the Element Hiding helper.
That said, the EHH has a problem working on pages like these with very little CSS. Apparently your addon can handle that stuff, as it uses a different underlying engine. Still, I don’t know if I’d rather use it than the EHH.
NETA: Adblock can and does handle the ads here without placeholders. But the CSS of the links is the same as the actual posts, so I can’t just select the links pane. I’m sure there might be a way to tweak it to working, but why bother when another addon can handle it better?