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Comment by exodust | Hacker News Reader

As much as I like Adblock, did you know it blocks static jpeg images that contain the text "300x250px" or similar in the file name? I didn't know until it blocked one of the images I put into a site that has no ads.

I presume AdBlock's logic is that because promo ads often have the dimensions in the filename, that's good enough reason to block EVERY image on the web that has dimensions in the filename. Pathetic logic!

While you might be happy browsing away on the internet with Ad-Block, it could very well be blocking non-ad content, which is not something you want as core browser functionality.

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What list are you using?

I've never noticed that with EasyList.

Edit: Quick optical grep confirms it, nothing to match image dimensions I could see in the filter rules.

How do you not see all the image dimensions in the filter rules? Picking just the those mentioned I tried 'grep 300x250 easylist.txt' and got 478 results!

Many are very specific and look like useful filters, but here are just a small sample of rules that are problematic: -300x250- -300x250_ .300x250. .300x250_ /300x250- /300x250. /300x250/

I see plenty along the pattern of "Ad300x250", but not general ones.

Search further down, they're there.
This is actually frustrating, I had thought until now that easylist blocked only third party ads; this means they block self-hosted as well.

There's this: -300x250_
looks like the culprit.
I wasn't up to speed on the lists business. I will look into using a different list. I was just using adblock now and then at the default settings, I installed it and haven't touched settings.
I don't use it all the time because I don't want it interfering with testing and dev, messing with the document.
When it backfires and hides stuff you've just published, suddenly I'm cursing adblock because I know other default adblock users won't see the image.

Ugh, you're right. Checking the default list from https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt confirms it. I'll have to look into this more and see if there is a better list to subscribe to.

Image name should be describing the image any way. That's just good seo.

Putting dimensions in image names is fine, it's quite useful for asset management.
Describing the image is the alt tag's job. Otherwise, consider the nightmare...
Britney_Spears_Red_Carpet_MTV_Awards_2012_834pm_Headshot.jpg
Which isn't great file naming for the web. Or am I too oldschool and this is how all the kool kids do it now?
Do search engines expect meta data in image names? I don't think they're counting on it, even if they are picking it up.

>Which isn't great file naming for the web.
Why?

Because of standardized naming convention, or lack of.
In the Britney example, there's no naming convention, only a vague approximation of the image contents.
This may work for you personal blog, but in large production environments, you don't want editors just "making up" image names without consistent naming convention.
Remember that the original digital camera image has no mention of Britney! At best, when the RAW image is converted, the general image name might be appended with "mtv_awards", but nothing further.
Same for video file naming. You can't fit all the subject matter of the video into its file name, you would instead maybe put the reverse date in the name and an abbreviated title. But to expect that to be used for SEO is not a good strategy.

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