Josh Sherman
This is probably one of the most rotten experiments I have done in recent times. I wanted to see what would happen if I blocked site usage from folks using ad blocking software. Would it cause a stir? Would people figure out that their ad blocker is to blame? Would it upset the site’s ecosystem?
The answer to all of those questions is “YES” and I honestly don’t recommend doing this to your users. In fact, I don’t even recommend slapping ads on your site. Find a better way to build a business, ad revenue is just too damn volatile, even if you are doing direct sales.
Anyway, ranting about how your customers become the product when ads are involved and all of that soapboxing nonsense isn’t the point of this post. The point is to discuss how fucking it easy it is to trick ad blocking software into denying people access to your site.
So to start off, I did some research on how to write filters for AdBlock Plus. Once I had the gist of it, I went ahead and got my hands on a list of filters. This is easily done by going to the options for the extension and clicking on the name of the filter list. I went with EasyList because it was there and I guess it’s enabled by default.
Upon vising the EasyList website and snagged a copy of the filters.
It’s a pretty massive file, but I knew what I was looking for. If you search
the file for ##. you’ll see some class names that are considered ads and
should be blocked.
I took one of those values, like ##.TTButtAd (because butts) and slapped the
class name on the body: <body class="TTButtAd">. Cue explosions, because the
site was being recognized as an ad and the whole body was being hidden.
As I mentioned, I don’t recommend this at all because it doesn’t provide your users with any explanation as to why the site is borked. It was a fun experiment though, so maybe you do want to give this a shot. Hell, maybe you could be really devious and add one of those blocked classes to buttons or something like that, so many ways to troll.
Even though I am not recommending you do this, there is still a lesson to be learned. First, don’t always throw JavaScript at your problems, understand the system you are working with and figure out how to make it do the work for you.
Second, you could pair this technique up with some JavaScript to figure out if a user is rockin’ an ad blocker and then harass them. Interrogating the ad units on your site directly may not be an option if you are doing some responsive voodoo to show and hide the ad units based on screen size (which is actually allowed by AdSense now ;)
I leave you with one of the nicer quotes from this experience:
Whatever if sk did actually block adblock then good on them, ads are the only cash flow this website has lol, they need the money. I support this. Good on you.
