Indeed. Once I finished the article I sat there and had to think: "what am I supposed to be feeling after reading this?". I think they want us to be angry that EasyList is only maintained by 4 people. Or maybe just be angry that EasyList exists. I'm not really sure.

My takeaway was that it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests in a timely manner.

Here's the forum thread in question. The suggested fix from EasyList was to rename a folder on AT's server from /advert/. As AT explained this folder was part of the URL for hundreds of thousands of cars and that the URL was used not only by the website, but other systems as well that move data around. In the end of the thread, you can see that the problem was fixed between EasyList and Autotrader.

https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148

Sound like a job for 301 Moved Permanently or just keeping both the new and old URLs valid but change to the new on the user facing pages.

Isn't it a bit disconcerting that we're so used to articles telling us what to feel that, when they don't do that, we get confused?

Maybe it's good just to have a reminder that much of our infrastructure is maintained by volunteers. Sometimes important policy decisions get made by whoever showed up and started doing the work in a way that looks competent to others.

I don't think its disconcerting at all.

Articles are supposed to have a point, a goal, etc. The goal might be persuasive, it might be to establish facts, it might be to argue for a specific change or against one. It's up to the reader to agree or disagree with what the article has laid out.

But we need something to agree or disagree with. In this case, I had no idea what the point of the article was (beyond a vague feeling that the author doesn't like EasyList).

Why does an article necessarily have to have a point? Why cant it just lay the facts and let the reader process them and judge them and feel about them how ever the reader wants?

In your example, the point of the article would be to "establish facts", which was an example I gave.

It supposedly did though

I was surprised it was that hard to change a route on autotrader. The article kept mentioning hundreds of thousands of pages, like they had some person editing each page in textmate.

I do wonder why they couldn't "just" support both old and new URL paths using something like this:

    RewriteRule "^/+new_path/+(.+)$" /advert/$1 [L]

... for each "new url path" (as, granted, they had quite a few which matched "advert".

... but that's also something they could again fix with another RewriteRule, I guess?

    RewriteRule "^(.*)/+new_path/+(.+)$" $1/advert/$2 [L]

... would've worked just as well?

It's probably not that it's hard to type sed -i but that they can not change URLs so easily. It might be price indexing engines, external partners authorized to edit certain paths, and any number of other things.

If parts of your audience blocks ads then it's probably a good idea to test your web site with uBlock installed, just as you already test with Safari and MSIE.

It's specifically not a good idea to rely on the block list maintainers who will have a hard time separating earnest bug reports from all the bogus ones who think they've found a clever way to avoid blocklists.

Maybe Autotrader has hundreds of thousands of template, CSS, and JS files with those paths hardcoded. Imagine the hell it would be to work on that website.

Even so, you could fix everything with a one line Perl command.

I would love to see an example of something like this.

Please.

I've seen backends that were that horrible. Updates were often done via regex's.

That's basically half of my day to day at the moment, that's why I'm wondering

why should an e-commerce focused site do anything at all to avoid the term 'advert' in the first place? anyone there is ostensibly interested in commerce/advertising..

list maintainers should be responsible regression test their lists for normal content and not do dumb things

this is also a problem with bad/unscrupulous spam listings which list domains based on unsubstantiated requests, etc

You can choose to buy things online without being exposed to the cancer that is advertising.

I am against advertising and marketing and yet spend a considerable amount of money online, and I’m confident most of HN does the same.

> .. it's pretty impressive they still respond to exclusion requests

They responded and removed amp-analytics. I'm not that impressed.

https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/8311

Impressed that they respond in a timely manner, as per the article. The part you excluded from the quote is sort of the crux of my statement. I made no comment to the how they respond.

It wasn't my intention to exclude it, fat fingers.

makes me want to avoid Autotrader... where did this /advert/ come from anyways...

I haven't looked, but I'm guessing ... When you list a second hand car for sale, that's an "advert". Sometimes the adverts are the content you want :-)

so they probably could have used /vehicle/, to be more specific

Also as a quick aside, they mention that AutoTrader would've had to fix "hundreds of thousands of pages" and I'm calling bullshit. No site of that magnitude is using straight up HTML pages. Even if it's a jekyll thing where you'd have to change a bunch of templates, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of the required changes could be done in a few seconds with any decent text editor.

I would not be surprised if they are telling the truth here.

I worked on an early version of a big woodworking website and it was over six thousand static html pages.

The group that acquired it needed to show progress asap, which meant simply updating the header to their new logo and footer nav.

I had to write about a dozen sequenced find and replace routines with regex to do even basic changes. In some cases groups of pages used subtly different html it was a real mess.

It took a long time for them to get all the pages replicated in a templating system to avoid seo loss.

The thing is though that's a bad system, whether EasyList is prompting the changes, or the SEO, etc. and it feels like they're trying to pin "we had to fix thousands of pages" on EasyList as though their shit workflow is EasyLists' fault.

The thing is is that AutoTrader is a website that advertises cars, they don't even have any other advertising on their site. And because EasyList doesn't like a word in their URL, the website breaks through no fault of their own. If the owner of the website is doing nothing wrong, the onus is on the owner of the blocking technology to come up with a system that works correctly.

I just visited the AutoTrader site (from the UK), and uBlock Origin blocked 34 requests related to ads and tracking. I recall in the past having been surprised at the number of extra requests being made via their site. They don't serve only vehicle listings.

Ooops, that's my misread of the forum posting from the AutoTrader team. They have 2 sites, one public, the other is a portal for car dealers to post cars in which they stated does not serve ads. The problem they were having though is that the ad blocker was affecting popup menus within their site.

https://forums.lanik.us/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=43148&sid=e0edf...

In that light, I agree with your original comment, though it's amusingly ironic that their portal site was negatively impacted by mitigation measures against the kind of things their public site engages in.

It would be rather ironic if the post you replied to only thought they ran no ads because they forgot they ran an ad blocker.

I've been working in big tech companies for too long. When I got to that part, I thought to myself, "Wait, they think hundreds of thousands is a lot of content? That should be fixable over someone's lunch break!"

What big tech company do you work at that can edit other people's websites to link to renamed URLs? I am sure that "mv /www-data/adverts /www-data/foobar" is a trivial operation. Making links work (adblock will block the 302 you skillfully put in place) is harder.

Ahh--the lunch break comment assumed that this was a local change to hundreds of thousands of pages, so disregard that. I was commenting more on the notion that hundreds of thousands of files/urls/database records is a lot. It sounds like a lot to the average reader.

You would be surprised. Many years ago I worked on a CMS for a large household-name client. Their entire website was made up of individual HTML pages. No shared header, footer, or anything; if you wanted to update one of those, you would be updating it thousands of times.

My task was to move all of that into a very minimal CMS. All the content would be in flat files, and the page itself would load the header, footer, content, etc.

Because every page was different, but mostly similar, I wrote an Emacs extension that let you identify the content areas (it tried some heuristics and you could guide it) and it would do the extraction and emit the flat content file and the replacement JSP file.

What you have to realize is that many people have systems that are designed for 1 "thing" and have since "scaled" that up 1000x. People still treat their website as a directory of arbitrary HTML. People manage 1000 servers like they managed their one and only very first server. It is the natural way of growth. Engineering is figuring out when that model doesn't apply anymore, and changing it. Engineering is in short supply, however, leading to stories like mine above or the "thousands of pages" blocked by EasyList.

I used to work at a commercial website host where the primary product they sold was "promo pages for your xyz business and abc products" and each and every single page was manually updated down to the head/footer and statically served. They had "templates" in a notepad, and you copy and paste it out and edit as needed. Which means that after you make the initial creation, any subsequent edit (including things like headers, meta tags, etc) needs to be done by hand. This product was still being sold very very recently, and they have a lot of clients (like in the hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue)

I wouldn't be at all surprised if AutoTrader used manual editing for everything, with no access to scriptability.

Not everyone is using jekyll or any modern stacks ... the echo chamber is strong here. I guarantee you 65% of the Internet is still being edited by hand.

This is all just speculation, but this attempted hit-piece on EasyList appears to be slowly pushing AutoTrader in front of the approaching bus.

It’s perfectly possible.

I once worked on a site that had over 25k pages, all hand coded HTML with Microsoft Frontpage. And all in the root folder.

Not even the owner knew how many pages there actually were.

If HN is going to upvote suspicious articles, maybe we could have a separate voting system in the corner of the HN article page, for guessing whether some third party initiated the article.

> "It’s crazy that more people don’t know about this," said Marty Kratky-Katz, the founder of Blockthrough, which lets publishers monetize using Adblock Plus’s Acceptable Ads program.

If only there were a business service that might help me navigate this perilousness of which I have just learned, so that I might better monetize.

Let us hope that we are entering the last chapter in the life of the absurd ad-based business model that the internet has been built upon thus far.

It makes me giddy to consider how much the quality of the internet will improve when the bottom-feeders are at last excluded from it.

Easylist is not well maintained, and sometimes they have really petty arguments with website owners instead of just fixing rules that break actual content. For example, they have a specific list of sites that are not allowed to show Amazon affiliate links. They don't block all such links as a policy or anything, it just breaks specific websites. https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=37621623#p3762...

I've read the EasyList forum thread linked above for the AutoTrader site, and the issue there was indeed a generic rule that just breaks every link containing advert. That is some monumental, unfathomable stupidity. And instead of realizing that, they have the gall to refer to that rule existing for a very long time!

The same issue was seen with Spamhaus and similar IP block services for eMail spam. What were selfless intentions quickly morphed into ineffective, power-crazed gatekeepers and extortion artists that have made SMTP an unusable protocol unless you are Google or Amazon.

Digiday are a trade pub for the online advertising and “sponsored content” industry. You bet they want you to be upset about ad blocking.