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