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.