[HN Gopher] Tracking Blocked Scripts
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       Tracking Blocked Scripts
        
       Author : Amorymeltzer
       Score  : 11 points
       Date   : 2023-05-17 20:05 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (chriscoyier.net)
 (TXT) w3m dump (chriscoyier.net)
        
       | jccalhoun wrote:
       | Amusingly, when javascripts are blocked on his site it is a black
       | background with white text which is easier for me to read than
       | the color scheme with javascripts allowed
        
       | nr2x wrote:
       | "Hey the user clearly doesn't want this. But I'm a web developer
       | in 2023 and the user is my enemy! How can we do something the
       | user explicitly does not want us to do?"
        
       | varenc wrote:
       | Armed with this information I discovered the endpoint codepen
       | hits when it detects that the ad-serving script is blocked!
       | https://codepen.io/cpe/puppies-and-kittens?id=<id>
       | 
       | It looked so innocuous it took me a sec to notice. You can
       | definitely tell it's named in a way to avoid blocking rules. I
       | appreciate the little humor too.
       | 
       | Codepen plays nice and just uses this for logging purposes. But
       | when other sites take more aggressive anti-ad-block measures your
       | ad-blocker can still defeat them by silently redirecting some
       | analytics/ad-serving JavaScipt to an internal no-op resource.
       | That way the error handler isn't called but the JS doesn't
       | actually run. Or the JS is replaced with a no-op equivalent. See
       | uBlock's resource library here:
       | https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library
       | 
       | (I imagine a site like codepen, with its technical audience, sees
       | a lot more users with ad blockers.)
        
         | kevin_thibedeau wrote:
         | I once felt mildly guilty about JS and ad blocking so I tried
         | running unblocked at work since the performance degradation of
         | all the crap was less noticeable on a fast link. That lasted a
         | few months until I got redirected to a porn site from what was
         | likely a hacked Wordpress system. If I'm going to be assailed
         | by unvetted code that does unauthorized things with my
         | property, I'm going to block everything wholesale without any
         | lingering guilt.
         | 
         | If you're a business and you want to serve ads do it with plain
         | text and images. If you need to track me do it with your server
         | logs. You don't deserve anything else.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-17 23:00 UTC)