thanks on the help,
rami

Firstly, if it wasn’t working for you there’s a few possibilities. The most likely is that in fact it is working, it’s just that you don’t know what you’re looking for; it doesn’t unblock *all* ads - as I said, some were too much trouble to bother with, and those tended to be the most obvious ones, like the banners at the top and the square in-article ads. Another possibility is that the test case didn’t match your filters, in which case sure, it won’t work, but if that’s the case then the original ads wouldn’t have been blocked either.

Another possibility is that the filter list you’re using has already been updated to cater for this :)

If you have Noscript, then yeah, the unblocker won’t work, and neither will the original ads. But again, this can be worked around on the server, by making requests for the JS content, parsing it and writing it to the page directly.

The thing with blocking the unblocking script - the only reason you can block it is that I designed it to be blockable. I could have designed it to be unblockable, but I chose not to, because that was never the point of the excercise.

Making it unblockable would be pretty simple. All I’d have to do is make all requests for ad content (including the unblocker script) point to root, and then use header information to discriminate what content is required. To block that the extension would need to be able to filter by header information .. but even that could be circumvented, by adding a degree of sessional or random data to the headers.

Like I say, it’s an arms race - anything I can do, adblock can prevent; and anything it can prevent, I can circumvent. It goes on and on. The only guaranteed way of blocking content is to block an entire domain.

Anyway the script is gone now - experiment over :)

Never noticed. Most users running AdBlock also use NoScript.

I doubt very much that most Adblock users also run NoScript. In fact, I’d be surprised if as many as 1 in 20 did.

The reason why adblockers always win the arm race is because there are more of us than there are of you. I can simply blacklist your script in a fraction of the time it took for you to code and implement it, so the most I’ll ever see is one ad. I have this functionality because advertisers have pissed so many people off, a collective force of hundreds or thousands of coders consistently devote time to ensuring you don’t pester them (and everyone else).

I’d be careful about setting challenges like that. What if the script was randomly encoded each time the page loaded? It’s name and content are entirely different every time you reload and the inner working of the script are only the same once the script has decoded itself.

Sure, you can manually block it again each time, but the programmer/user effort equation just veered back towards the programmer.

The reason why adblockers always win the arm race is because there are more of us than there are of you. I can simply blacklist your script in a fraction of the time it took for you to code and implement it, so the most I’ll ever see is one ad. I have this functionality because advertisers have pissed so many people off, a collective force of hundreds or thousands of coders consistently devote time to ensuring you don’t pester them (and everyone else).

I do genuinely think SitePoint deserve my money from the advice I’ve been given here, so I buy books occassionally. To date I’ve never bought anything having clicked on an ad anyway, so the ‘reward’ loss to SitePoint will amount to a couple of dollars in lost pay-per-view clickthroughs, which you more than made up for in the cost of delivery of the books I bought, heh.

Besides, I think the ad provider would become pretty suspicious if the majority of the requests for the ads would suddenly start coming from one (i.e. the server’s) IP address.