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0 pointsWorldWideWayne10y ago0 comments

Sites could easily refuse to serve content to people who run adblockers or who turn off Javascript.

Instead, by serving their content upon request, the sites are implicitly agreeing to my terms. So, I'm not doing anything wrong by running an ad-blocker on my computer.

I think it would be great if someone codified this too. If servers can have Terms of Service, so can users. Wouldn't it be great if my browser could send a TOS to each site once before I accepted content from them? A simple notification of my terms, via a custom header sent from a browser extension would work today, but I don't feel that I need to do this since most servers happily give me their content.

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johnward10y ago

Actually, ad blockers work hard to make sure this can't happen. I'd like for a site to be able to identify those users and decide not to serve content but there is a reason why adblockers don't want this. If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

There is no way to identify an ad blocker in the initial request. If there was the adblocker would just spoof those params anyway. The way most of the scripts detect ad blockers is to load some JS class in an file that is likely to be blocked by an ad blocker. If the class is loaded they assume that ads are not blocked.

WorldWideWayneOP10y ago

Actually, there are sites that already can and do detect adblock so however hard the adblockers are working to stop this, it's not working. Getting hung up on the fact that you can't do it in the initial request is introducing a strawman.

> If I can identify that you are running an adblocker then I could do something even more malicious than serving an ad.

Well, then you'd be an asshole. Running an adblocker on my computer is not malicious, so some site responding with a possibly illegal action wouldn't be a good solution for anyone.

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