‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-blocking list

Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by bredren on Friday August 02, 2019 @12:08PM (#20594113)

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.

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by FussyZeus on Friday August 02, 2019 @12:12PM (#20594147)

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.

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by donarb on Friday August 02, 2019 @01:09PM (#20594600)

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.

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by ksangeelee on Friday August 02, 2019 @01:40PM (#20594921)

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.

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by donarb on Friday August 02, 2019 @03:53PM (#20596046)

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...

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by ksangeelee on Friday August 02, 2019 @04:19PM (#20596250)

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.

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by FussyZeus on Friday August 02, 2019 @03:27PM (#20595833)

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.

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by ryandrake on Friday August 02, 2019 @12:46PM (#20594394)

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!"

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by jrockway on Friday August 02, 2019 @01:39PM (#20594913)

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.

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Re:‘Just four dudes’: Inside EasyList, a community-run ad-bl... by ryandrake on Friday August 02, 2019 @02:57PM (#20595607)

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.

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