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Comment by endisneigh | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand - is it not possible to construct a site that does not allow you to download if you have an ad-blocker? It seems trivial:

1. Show an ad, include a special value.

2. Download only if special value is present.

3. If special value is not present, tell user they must disable ad-block to download.

Most sites fail to do this not because of technical complexity, but because they don't care about ad-blocking and/or it doesn't affect their business greatly. In ZS's case, they should've implemented this.

I chalk this up to poor management tbh. Things like the electricity cost increase could have been balanced with more ads to compensate. The kind of things on ZS tend to be nefarious, and the electricity needed would likely be offset by say, a 15 second video being watched before downloading.

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It really isn't this simple, no. I remember a number of years ago someone tried to do this. Pardon the language, but the "product" was called "Fuck adblock" I believe. It was a piece of JS that you could include on your site that, if I remember correctly, tried to see if certain JS objects existed. If they did exist, you could disable aspects (or the whole thing) of your site. Very soon after, someone released "Fuck fuck adblock" that essentially disabled this piece of JS.

It was a cat and mouse game for a while, but ultimately, if you want to detect if someone is using adblock, you need to do it in JS. And then the ad blockers will just add that piece of JS to their block lists.

Then you make it so the AdBlock checker is the one that actually loads/displays the content

Then people will reverse engineer the AdBlock checker and make the content load without ads

Sure, but it's much easier to be on the defensive here rather than the offensive. And it implies your site is popular enough to warrant anyone reverse engineering it anyway.

Since the adblocker strats are necessarily public, you could even have a system to automatically monitor them and apply a set of composable tweaks which breaks the current public release.

Any website that uses admiral or any form of anti adblock gets an instant nope from me. I get that websites get paid for running ads, but when ad companies have no curation and start pushing ecchi mobile games and refusing access for not disabling adblock, I can take my browsing traffic elsewhere.

There are ways to detect certain kinds of ad blocking but they're not always reliable. The client web browser has no obligation to report back to the server with what it's decided to show the user.

I used to want to try and make something that would render ads to a virtual dummy screen, so anything that would check for them would show them as being present, but no user would see them.

Speaking for myself only here (but I suspect I'm not alone), I don't use an ad blocker to primarily block visual ads (although it's a nice side effect).

I use an ad blocker to block tracking networks and protect my privacy, and one of the end results of that is that visual ads get blocked.

So I can't imagine a scenario where I'd need to fake-render the visual ad, since the ad code never has the chance to get that far.

The scenario I was thinking of was a final solution to the cat and mouse game of detecting ad blockers.

If the site and js checks and thinks the ad is being displayed but it isn't, that's a win.

For sure, I actually love this idea in theory, it's super clever. :-)

I was just pointing out that it's unlikely we'd be in that scenario, since this approach feels like it would imply letting the ad JS run, but tricking it into thinking that an ad was displayed. Or am I missing something?

If I understood correctly, that means the ad's JS would still run in the background and run any included tracking code, which is what I think a lot of people try to prevent with an ad blocker, more than just hiding the visual ad.

Oh, I see, I think I misunderstood your previous reply - my apologies! And thanks :)

My thinking is that the visual and tracking ads are often one and the same. Much tracking is invisible and many ads are well-behaved, but I would say most visual ads are tracking ads also.

For me, as much as I care about tracking and stuff, it's been really nice not seeing basically any ads on my web experience for the last 10 years, so I think really I just wanted to attempt to 'end' the cat and mouse game. At least for a while.

Essentially: It doesn’t scale. I wrote a small adserver for our website, and I also detect if ads are blocked by simply fetch-ing the google ads script (which we also run because some agencies require it). When they are blocked (or if there is no GDPR consent, same thing from our PoV), we only deliver ads that only depend on our own servers (we have several partnerships with merchants, so we can show their product ads or our own products, simple HTML with images).

But all that only works, because it’s only active on a single website and could change in any way we want in minutes. If it were widespread, it would quickly be blocked, and changes would have to be replicated by everyone using it.

People just move on if it's too complicated.

That would require coordination from the ad delivery networks.

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