Avram's journal

With LiveJournal’s new owners announcing that LJ will no longer allow the creation of new Basic accounts, lots of people are upset over the prospect of having to look at ads. For those of you lagging behind the leading edge of web browser technology, here’s a solution:

Step 1: Firefox if a free open-source web browser available for Windows, MacOS X, and Linux. (If you use Linux, you already know all about it, so just skip right on to some other post.) Download and install it. It’s free. Costs no money. Since it’s open-source, it’s highly customizable with lots of themes and add-ons, which brings us to…

Step 2: AdBlock is a free add-on for Firefox that allows you to block ads from showing up when you browse the web.

Special for Mac users: If you don’t want to leave Safari, you can still block ads! SafariBlock is a Safari add-on based on AdBlock. Or try Ad Subtract, which uses CSS to hide ads.

Another reason to use browser extensions: Y’know how when a LiveJournal post gets a lot of comments, LJ starts hiding some of them, and you need to keep clicking to unfold the hidden comments? Doesn’t that annoy the crap out of you? Here’s what you do:

• For Firefox, get Greasemonkey.
• For Safari, get Greasekit.
• In either case, get LJ Thread Unfolder.

Now those long comment pages will get an “Unfold All” link at the top of the comments. Click that, and it all unfolds. (In my experience, this doesn’t work perfectly — a few comments stay folded — but it works pretty well.)

I’m using Firefox on both my home and work computers. And I’ve got the Adblock extension installed. This means that I’ve got the power to delete annoying images from my web-browsing experience.

I find animated ads annoying.

There are lots of weblogs I read on a regular basis where I’m not seeing ads. On Making Light, I only see the text portion of the ads — at some point there must have been an ad there (or in another Blogads weblog) with an animated image, and I right-clicked it, chose “Adblock image” from the contextual menu, and edited the filter string to read http://images.blogads.com/*. Bang, no more images (of any kind, animated or still) in any ad (on any blog) served by Blogads.

(I’ve since learned that hitting the ESC key stops all animated GIFs on a page in Firefox. But I’m not about to go back and edit all those saved Adblock filters. And I don’t think ESC does anything to stop Flash ads.)

I suppose that, should this habit of mine catch on, Blogads (and I’m choosing them as an example only because they’re handy) could change the way they publish their ads. It probably wouldn’t be hard to randomize the name of their image server, or maybe use some fancy DHTML tricks to serve annoying content some more sophisticated way. Then I’d probably have to use Greasemonkey to defeat them, and might wind up not seeing their ads at all — Greasemonkey allows much more interesting ways of bypassing ads.

But I don’t want that to happen. I like it when web authors can earn money off their content without locking it up behind for-pay subscription walls. And an ever-escalating war of advertisers-vs-scripters could be even more annoying than the animated ads.

What’s the solution? I don’t know if there is one, or even a problem, really. I doubt that even 10% of web users will ever take up habitual ad-blocking. As long as there are only a few of us, advertisers and publishers probably don’t have much of an incentive to counter our blocks. Still, I wonder if there’s a way that someone who wants to have ads can avoid serving up annoying content. I’d expect this to be an issue for web cartoonists — who wants an annoying, flashing ad served up next to one’s art?

A first stab at a solution: An advertising service could set up a special “no animation” tier. Presumably this would pay less than the regular tier of service. This tier would have a policy of serving only JPEG and PNG images; I don’t think animation can be done with either of those. No JavaScript either. I think that would eliminate all animation, and it could all be verified programmatically.

Ten Ads America Won’t See, from AdAge.com. Some are just JPEGs, like the cover of a Filipino skin magazine that admits it doesn’t know why it bothers putting any text in. Others are videos, like the amusing beer ad about a man explaining sex to a four-year-old using a sausage, or a woman who’s been reincarnated as a cockroach, or the world’s worst Nativity play.

The videos are ASF files; my old copy of VLC media player didn’t play the sound, but the latest version works pretty well.