I use AdBlock Plus because it makes the internet a reasonably better place.
Lately, nearly every site pops up “disable adblock to continue,” in some form or another. On reddit, I was told applying a certain block list would block the “unblock me” requests. It doesn’t work, at all.
Is there ANYTHING we can do to circumvent the “please unblock me to continue” popups? I’ve tried to use the Adblock “block elements” to block the unblock pop ups but it freezes the page.
Will no one rid me of this turbulent unAdblock requests?
What you need to do is select the Advanced User Mode. There you can block scripts. Inline scripts are the more common ones to block for the type of problem you have.
I don’t know, but I’m following this thread because I have the same frustration. I finally gave up and turned adblock off about 6 months ago. I looked around then and there were no new services that were undetectable. Now I just despise the ads.
I’m generally fine with ads, I totally get that ads are what allows for free content, but the ads have become so intrusive they dramatically inhibit the use of websites. I was on one recently and they had superimposed ads at the top and bottom of each webpage. I could only read about 5 lines of text between the ads. I took a screenshot and emailed their webmaster telling them how f’d up their site was and this was exactly why I used an adblocker.
My annoyance is when I want to read a news article or something at work, and I get the “turn off your ad blocker” popup. The ads are being blocked by the company’s firewall. I can’t turn it off.
Remember that you can disable adblock/ublock just for specific sites. That is, if you go to a site and won’t load until you turn off your adblocker, turn it off there (or whitelist the site, same thing). Now that site will run with your adblocker disabled, but it’s still on for the rest of the internet.
The other thing you can do is look into getting a pi-hole. I just set one up and I’m still experimenting with it, but so far it seems to be working well. It’s a small computer, about the size of a deck of cards that you load a program (called pi-hole) onto. You plug it into your network and point your router’s DNS addresses to it’s IP address. Every time something on your network, even your phone, reaches out to the internet for any reason at all (ie to load a page or fetch an ad), everything goes through it first. This is generally undetected by websites, unlike a browser add-on. Granted, websites will catch up eventually. It’s my understanding that some will actually check to make sure ads are loading. But it should buy you some time.
And with the raspberry pi thing. You can do that for under $30. Also, I don’t know the first thing about linux, but I still managed to get it (and later a second one) from opening the box to up and running in about a half hour.
Script blockers are the answer (in addition to an ad blocker). I use NoScript.
But… you can’t simply install a script blocker and forget about it. You need to know what it’s doing, you need to manually set it for different sites, and you need to sometimes change the settings temporarily to access some particular content.
A combination of an ad blocker, NoScript, and Self-Destructing Cookies works well for me. But I admit it’s not for everybody - you have to tinker with settings.
I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ll mention it again.
Simply disabling JavaScript works wonders. It’s a mixed blessing, true, but I find it much more helpful than unhelpful.
Disabling JS causes most web pages to load MUCH faster (but some pages, or some parts of some pages, won’t load at all). A lot of ads seem to be blocked. Many (but not all) pictures and graphics get blocked. Interactive parts of pages tend not to work. A lot of annoying shit that some pages do get blocked. Sites that do e-commerce of any sort tend not to work. But one can easily re-enable JS when you need to go to one of those pages.
Sites that are primarily just text generally work well enough without JS. This includes most news sites (what I read mostly), and this message board. Another advantage: Blocking JS seems to get past a lot of paywalls. In particular, sites that let you read a limited number of articles per day or month, seem not to have this limitation with JS blocked. For example, I can read WaPo or NYT all day and not get blocked. (Or maybe that’s because I delete all cookies regularly.)
Another trick to experiment with: Disable styles. This disables a whole lot of page formatting. Loosely speaking, much that is not plain text gets garbled beyond recognition, but portions of the page that are plain text become very easy to read. Overall, pages become very primitive looking without styles, but if you’re just wanting to read the plain text, it is just fine.
Experiment with these options and see how you like them. YMMV.
I use a program called Adguard that works without too much hassle.
You can easily disable it for 30 seconds to get you on a site if necessary.
There is another program which I can’t remember the name of at the moment, that send a signal to the website kidding it into thinking you are not using an ablocker.
I’ve experimented with options such as turning off JS or using NoScript. Sure, they work but I also found they make browsing a pain in the butt with the endless tinkering on this site and that and eventually decided that the game wasn’t worth the candle. Now, as recommended above, I simply use Ublock Origin which, with its Adblock Detector Killers and other enhancements, make browsing a pleasure again.
A +1 on turning off Javascript, and installing some form of script blocker.
I’ve also used outline.com to obtain the text of some particularly recalcitrant news sites. Doesn’t work on all of them.
I’ve heard great things about installing a pi-hole on your network.
Eventually it will get to the point where the site won’t load without a certificate from the ad-server indicating the ad made it to your screen and was able to play. Then we’ll spoof certificates, I suppose, or load the ads into a virtual machine that isn’t actually connected to the screen or speakers. And so on.
I don’t mind unobtrusive ads. I do mind large ads that take up a large part of the screen, often blocking the text box. I mind ads that deliver malware. And I detest audio ads and auto playing videos.
That’s kinda sorta what the pi hole is doing. The ads still thinking they’re getting served up but the pi-hole (which the network thinks is a DNS) sends them into the abyss. I don’t entirely understand why another piece of equipment is needed to do this, but it seems to work.
That’s how I used to be. Then it got to the point where one of my favorite sites at the time (howstuffworks) moved from having too many ads scattered throughout their articles to allowing some of them to be animated and flashing/blinking. I really can’t read when something on the screen is moving…when there’s multiple things on the screen moving, I’ll leave the page. It’s just too much.
Hopefully, websites will learn soon enough about the point of diminishing returns. There might be money in the ads, but if they ads go overboard you’ll lose the viewers.
I’ve seen virtual pi holes now, as opposed to cobbling together some Raspberry Pi contraption on the router. No idea how they work—I had thought they just blocked all traffic from the ad server—but I’m looking forward to tinkering with one. Especially at home, on my wireless network. The desktop is fairly well locked down, but using my mobile device, which doesn’t have all of the script blockers and ad blockers, is a PITA.
The advertisement arms race is really ridiculous. Local news stations are about the worst as far as ad filled garbage on the screen. Which naturally has priority when loading the page. I’m at the point of saying those sites are unusable without some form of blocker.
Do these ads actually result in increased sales for the entities advertising with them?
I use Firefox and I run Privacy Badger and Ublock Origin. Between the two of them I see near zero ads, and I don’t get those “Turn off your ad blocker” popups, even on sites that are notorious for them, like Forbes and Business Insider.
The Daily Mail’s gotten annoying about it very recently. The Seattle Times has been a pain for quite awhile now. If your set up allows you to read those w/o complaint, then it’s tougher than mine.
I confess to being too lazy to turn on and off javascript, which I think gets rid of at least the Mail’s nag-popup.
It’s a bit annoying but no big deal for me to disable my two ad-blockers for a particular site if I want to read an article. I can always turn them back on when I’m done reading.
However, I’m not about to subscribe to the Murfreesboro Citizen-Picayune just to read some quirky little piece unavailable elsewhere. Sorry fellas, I can live without it.
*interesting that the few websites with truly obtrusive ads that caused me to download adblockers in the first place (i.e. Sports Illustrated and the Dope) don’t refuse to display content unless I disable the ad-blockers. That will probably be next.
I do have both extensions at their highest settings, with every possible filter turned on, which does irreparably break some sites, but frankly the way I see it, if your website is broken by my setup, it’s probably not worth visiting in the first place.
My local newspaper’s website will let me get most of those nag screens by using private mode. They still have a lot of articles that require you to actually log in to see.
I just tried Seattle Times and after a few articles, the nag screen pops up. I found that if you use private mode, you’ll get a handful of articles and when it blocks you, you can close the window, reopen a new private window and read more. I assume that private mode on my browser is allowing cookies to exist for just that session. If you don’t allow any, you could probably keep going.
Short answer: use private mode for Seattle Times. If it blocks you, close the window and open a new one. Alternatively, delete it’s cookies, that should work as well, but a lot more work to do after every couple of articles.
Huh. I tried doing it in incognito mode in Chrome, but was still getting blocked. It’s been awhile since i tried though. (I was trying to find info on some local to them seismic issues and a bad mudslide that had happened in central WA.) The issues I had evidently made an impression.
Tried it again just now with ScriptBlocker for Chrome and Ghostery and now nothing loads except a banner at the top of the page. F’ em.
EDIT: I’m taking DC’s attitude more and more towards those sites. I can generally find the information somewhere else, or I guess I just didn’t need it that badly to begin with.
It’s possible that even in incognito mode, the site is still seeing the cookies on your computer. You could clear their cookies first and see what happens. But I don’t know how much time you want to spend playing around with it.
This might be what I’m dealing with now–because even when I allow ads on the Washington Post, it still says I’m using adblock and won’t let me access the articles. Refreshing the page (as per their directions) doesn’t work.
It’s really annoying that so many sites block adblock users.
I’ve heard of and tried to use Ublock Origins, but as someone here pointed out, it’s not some plug-in-and-go add-on, it’s something you constantly have to futz around with, which I’m not looking to do. I had hoped someone here would have a simpler solution, but considering that disabling adblock on certain sites isn’t working itself, it appears there’s no simple solutions available.
