Thank You for Making This A Great Forum

Pallas · 2024-07-09T11:43:04+00:00

I've noticed how much energy there is in the PACT challenge, the sight-reading thread, and really any thread where someone's asking for help. I just wanted t...

PianoMonk

Blocking ads on PW, or on any site for that matter, is only part of avoiding potential dangers. Without turning this into a seminar on Internet safety and security, if you want to know what kind of information you are giving to every website you visit, go here:
https://www.makeuseof.com/free-tools-test-browser-security/

An older security site, that still might make you think about ever going online again is this:
https://www.grc.com/shieldsup

Both of these sites will also tell you how to address any issues they expose.

Gombessa

navindra I wonder if the Ad Blocker is getting confused — it thinks the main PW site is the ad and ads themselves are the legit site... so Ad Blocker is stripping out PW and leaving the ad code. Might explain what I've been seeing.

I was using an adblocker (Ublock Origin) on PW for a long time, well before the VS acquisition. One thing I noticed is that some of the ads seem to be integrated into the core forum code, and can't be blocked without blocking the entire site. And if individual elements are blocked, they come back sometimes when cycled. I think it's a fairly common ad-blocker response tactic; if the ads are hosted through the same cells/tables as forum content, it's harder to isolate the ads and block only them, without also inadvertently blocking posts/threads/images.

I suspect with the additional ads added by VS, adblocking extensions are over-aggressively capturing much more of the site.

WieWaldi

Gombessa Interesting... I set up Ublock origin once. (3¹/₂ yrs ago) and since then the site looks like this:

No ads. Not on top, nor bottom, nor left or right side and most important: not between the posts. All screen is forum content! 😎

navindra

Gombessa One thing I noticed is that some of the ads seem to be integrated into the core forum code, and can't be blocked without blocking the entire site. And if individual elements are blocked, they come back sometimes when cycled. I think it's a fairly common ad-blocker response tactic; if the ads are hosted through the same cells/tables as forum content, it's harder to isolate the ads and block only them, without also inadvertently blocking posts/threads/images.

I think you figured it out. I see the new VS ad(s) in the header and footer.

It's really weird, but I suspect all the historical advertisers such as Modartt are basically getting a free ride at this point. VS are just applying a blunt instrument approach to inject their ads to Piano World without touching the rest of the site.

WieWaldi

Sophia And to mark a funny comment as "heads up for a funny comment - here is the funny comment - end of funny comment" would, well, instantly take the 'funny' out of the comment 😃

<funny comment on>
really? 🤣
<funny comment off>

Hmm...
Well..
Ok..
I got it.

Gombessa

WieWaldi
Looks like VS has replaced more of the original ads that Frank had--I recall 2 fairly persistent issues that I could never get isolated through Ublock:

There was an ad carousel with box or pillar ads at the footer of the page, if individual ads or the table row they sat in was selected to be blocked, they would occasionally return.
Blocking one or more the ad elements would cause gallery pictures hosted on PW to not show. Refreshing a few times might bring it back, but sometimes you had to unblock to see the hosted images.

It looks like VS replaced #1 with their own banner ad at the bottom, the benefit of that is it's easily blockable 🙂 No idea if #2 is still an issue.

SouthPark

I'm running firefox 115.13.0esr (64-bit) with 'adblocker ultimate' extension. And at the moment - that site does flicker for a split second - as in showing up momentarily. And then it looks like this - permanently.

But that is ok. I like it like that.

WieWaldi

SouthPark I always run multiple browsers on my PC. Firefox is the main browser with all the plugins. Chrome and MS-Edge are my fallback browsers, just in case Firefox+adblockers can't open a site. This happens in 1 out of 15 websites. In this case, I copy&paste the adress bar to Edge and click the box: "No, I don't want to make Edge the default browser. Thank you."
If my other browsers can't open the site, too, then I know the site is broken.

Rubens

I did it without protection. I think I'm gonna get sick. My fault. My parents told me never to do that.

iternabe

There is a more technical but much better way to block ads for the entire home network. If you have an always-on computer (e.g., server, raspberry pi), install pi-hole and use it as the DNS server. Basically, make your router's upstream DNS server point to pi-hole, and make pi-hole's upstream DNS server a trustworthy public one (e.g. openDNS, or Cloudflare). After that, you can download and activate some blocked domain lists (called Gravity list) in pi-hole.

This has been working superbly well for me. There is even an iPhone app that allow me to temporarily disable pi-hole blocking (i.e. for 5 minutes then automatically turn back on again) on the rare occasion that I need to see an ad.

TLH21

Brave has the built in block list that is in pi-hole (apparently, according to my friendly neighbourhood IT guru).

navindra

Pallas The video won't embed, at least I can't see the thumbnail. It's ABBA, Thank You for The Music.

This has been bugging me as well. It only seemed to happen with videos owned by big media companies and must have been a recent change by Google.

In any case, it took some investigation, but I think I finally chased it down and fixed it.

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