They also have awful interstitial ads [2] and, while they masquerade as a news organization, are actually a blog farm [3].
Blocking Forbes would be no great loss in terms of content, and would avoid a surprising amount of advertising- (and malware-) generated pain.
[1]: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware
[2]: <any Forbes article, e.g. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2016/01/08/meet-the-queen-of-imgur-the-image-sharing-site-thats-half-the-size-of-twitter/ >
[3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3zs6qk/gq_and_forbes_go_after_ad_blocker_users_rather/cyp2uls?context=3#cyowy51
Whenever I search for answers to Go-related questions, a website called "socketloop.com" is always the top search result. Although they have extraordinary SEO when it comes to serving content to Google or Bing crawlers, they don't serve traffic AT ALL to browsers with AdBlock installed.
Really frustrating... that blog site is turning into the "expertsexchange.com" of Go. I would rather just have its links excluded from my search results altogether. The crazy thing is that it's a one-man WordPress-like niche blog, for which I'd be shocked if it drew more than a few hundred bucks A YEAR in ad revenue anyway.
You can. Google offers a personal block list extension. For chrome at least.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...
- Upvote posts you like.
- Do not upvote posts you don't like.
- Use 'Flag' judiciously for content that you feel is not appropriate to HN.
- Let the HN ranking algorithm do its work.
I don't think this is a can of worms anyone really wants to open.
If you don't want to unwittingly visit Forbes, edit your /etc/hosts file.
I'm sure you can find a suitable plugin or HOSTS file modification that will prevent you from accessing forbes.com even accidentally.
forbes.com
forbesimg.com
forbes_video.edgesuite.net
app-ab13.marketo.com
If you're using uBlock Origin you can simply click on the uBlock-icon on the top left in your browser, click on the grey bar on top of the box that opened, go to "My Filters" and insert the above snippet into the text box.
Edit: formatting
I encountered this for the first time earlier today, and had to come back to the screen that tells you to turn it off at least 3 times, one can hope that it was just a 'temporary' hold to lure people in the idea, but no -- it's the real deal!
In reality, Forbes lawyers would beat you with a big stick and demonstrate that their public terms and conditions that nobody reads, absolve themselves from any responsibility!
Edit: It'd be nice if the folks downvoting would take the time to explain how they feel about this topic. Are there Forbes articles that actually pertain to the act of computer hacking, and not just modern (computerized) business?
Firstly there's been quite a few articles posted to HN that aren't even technology related, let alone being of proper substance, yet are still of interest to HN readers. For example I have fond memories reading through a bee keeping article posted here and the discussion that followed. Due to the popularity of that article and others like it, I think it's fair to say the readership isn't fixed on the idea that all articles must even be strictly technology related. Secondly you'll notice that BBC articles get posted here quite often and that's absolutely a mainstream news source.
First paragraph of the Guidelines:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
But I would go even farther. Block every site where you won't be able to read the content without having Javascript enabled. I have experienced several blogs where you won't see anything without Javascript.
All in all, blocking all sites that load their content would be insane scraping and more than a handful of problems.
Yes, you can use Javascript to make things prettier. I have no problem with that. But not showing content that is actually there, that's a no-go for me.
I do think it's a little extreme to ban sites that do this, but I also don't think that sites should do it and if banning them from HN means they won't then maybe that's not so crazy. I don't think banning them from HN will help, though.
Not going all out Richard Stallman. Everybody knows, you never go full Richard Stallman.
When ever I see a pay wall on HN these days, I "flag" it.
