• (disco)

    Oooh, a bonus article!

  • (disco) in reply to FrostCat

    I think @PaulaBean's glitches are getting even worse and in addition to not listing published articles she's also stopped unlisting unpublished articles.

  • (disco) in reply to PleegWat

    How there is always comments from before the articles were listed?

  • (disco) in reply to fbmac

    People assume that posting comments in Discourse is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually... from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint... it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff.

  • (disco) in reply to fbmac
    fbmac:
    How there is always comments from before the articles were listed?
    Not always are there comments before article topics are listed. Occasionally there are sleeping people when it goes up. Doesn't happen often, but I'm pretty sure it has at least once. That, and those that do indeed post comments while unlisted know how to Watch out for them in the Topic list...
  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    That, and those that do indeed post comments while unlisted know how to Watch out for them in the Topic list...

    And how do they do it?

  • (disco)

    The article is from tomorrow anyway, we're all time travelers here.

  • (disco) in reply to fbmac
    fbmac:
    And how do they do it?
    Tsaukpaetra:
    **Watch** out for them in **the Topic list**...
    Do this ^^. It saves lives...
  • (disco)

    Peter was enjoying his day off in part, because he was good at his job. He worked for an ad company

    May he burn in Hell for infinite eternities.

  • (disco) in reply to fbmac

    We're just good at our job.

    The secret isn't made too explicit to keep the frists out.

  • (disco)

    Another good reason to run ad-blocking software. No problem with tracking pixels not being served if you don't request them in the first place.

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    No problem with tracking pixels not being served

    Unless the web page is designed to be dependent on them loading properly in order to work. Encountered such a site that manually dynamically loaded ads to get around adBlock. Well, it got stopped at DNS, and since that somehow caused an error in the Javascript, the page failed to load correctly and most of the interactions on it didn't work.

  • (disco) in reply to fbmac
    fbmac:
    How there is always comments from before the articles were listed?

    Because they subscribe to the category or something, so they get notifications when it's put up, even though it's not listed.

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    most of the interactions on it didn't work.

    No great loss. Any page that pulls that :hankey:, I don't want to interact with.

  • (disco)

    glad to see that this article has zero comments. [image]

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    David_C:
    No problem with tracking pixels not being served

    Unless the web page is designed to be dependent on them loading properly in order to work.

    I ran across a lot of those back when I was redirecting ad sites to 127.0.0.1. Scripts would try to load the ad/tracker and would go into infinite loops when getting connection-failure errors from the TCP layer.

    Later on, I wrote a trivially-simple daemon that pretends to be a web server and always returns the same fixed-text document regardless of URL. Redirecting ads into that would rarely make pages hang because the script would get something - just not from the advertiser's server.

    Today, using AdBlock+ in Firefox, it removes the script from the page altogether, which works even better.

  • (disco)

    Ugh. My company had outages on Cyber Monday despite not running a sale at all, because our CDN company went down.

    The fucking CDN!

    :beer::crying_cat_face::beer:

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    AdBlock+

    FTW!

    David_C:
    Firefox
    Um, not so much.
  • (disco)

    Yay @PaulaBean! The Holidays have made you much more brillant lately!

  • (disco)

    And then @PaulaBean is still tripping. Someone catch her please!

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra

    Sad part: The article leads to the new topic (because that time it worked), so my Not-a-frist comment won't make any sense on the comments page...

  • (disco) in reply to Yamikuronue

    Remembered that a few years ago, when Facebook's CDN went down, it also take out the ability to load and post comments in Yahoo! news.

  • (disco)

    How did you even do that without tripping the DiscoRules?

  • (disco) in reply to Maciejasjmj

    She's done it before. I suppose the API she uses skips the name validation?

  • (disco)

    saving page locally and trying to modify all the links inside numerous minified javascripts?

    thats The Real WTF

    real developer would add the offending domain to the hosts file and run small local webserver returning 200 for every request

  • (disco)

    And that's why you use ghostery. I'm OK with pages showing some amount of advertisements, but it not only breaks pages and makes them load slow, they're also a major source of spyware.

    Locally hosted ads without nasty scripts are a-ok with me, the rest gets blocked.

  • (disco)

    TRWTF is that he didn't immediately install a blocker extension for her browser. Heck, he should have done that a long time ago.

  • (disco) in reply to foobar

    TRWTF is Firefox with no 'No Script' and no 'Add block plus'

  • (disco) in reply to foobar

    I'd imagine installing an adblocker at home is a fireable offense if you work for an advertising-analytics company.

  • (disco) in reply to David_C
    David_C:
    Later on, I wrote a trivially-simple daemon that pretends to be a web server and always returns the same fixed-text document regardless of URL. Redirecting ads into that would rarely make pages hang because the script would get something - just not from the advertiser's server.

    That's the way to do it!

  • (disco) in reply to martijntje
    martijntje:
    And that's why you use ghostery. I'm OK with pages showing some amount of advertisements, but it not only breaks pages and makes them load slow, they're also a major source of spyware.

    Locally hosted ads without nasty scripts are a-ok with me, the rest gets blocked.

    Unfortunately, I have been finding an increasing number of sites that break if you use Ghosterly--amazingly, some that break even when you whitelist the site. I haven't taken the time to puzzle out exactly what's going on.

  • (disco) in reply to LorenPechtel
    LorenPechtel:
    Unfortunately, I have been finding an increasing number of sites that break if you use Ghosterly

    it's the latest rage in anti-adblock technology!

    make is so your site literally doesn't work when ads blocked, or otherwise fail to load!

    truly this is the pinnacle of anti-adblock technology! this will stop those people from using adblockers!

    we don't need to tone back our ads, or make them less in your face annoying, or even vet them so that we're not unknowingly serving malware via our ads! all we have to do to win "teh internetz" as the kids say is to make our sites literally unusable without the ads!

    it's foolproof!

  • (disco) in reply to flabdablet
    flabdablet:
    That's the way to do it!

    That link is a lot slicker, but less robust, than what I wrote.

    I wrote up a small (about 300 lines) C program that acts as a web server. It recognizes HTTP version 0 and 1 requests for GET and HEAD, returning a dummy (but well-formed) HTML response. All other requests produce 400, 501 and 505 errors (all hard-coded) as I think is appropriate.

    I'm tempted to post it here, except there's a lot of WTFery in there due to the fact that I started writing it based on FDs (assuming I would make it into an actual daemon) which resulted in reinventing a few wheels (like an FD version of printf). Then I realized that I can just use xinetd and use stdin/stdout, but didn't refactor anything because I didn't care enough to bother.

    Additionally, that link is using DNS to hide sites. I didn't want to do that, because it won't work on my employer's computers, where I don't have permission to reconfigure DNS (and trying it would probably be a Bad Idea.) Instead, I used a proxy-auto-config file. Something similar to this worked great:

    function FindProxyForURL(url, host)
    {
        if (dnsDomainIs(host, ".247media.com") ||
            dnsDomainIs(host, ".accendo.com") ||
            dnsDomainIs(host, ".ad-flow.com") ||
            dnsDomainIs(host, ".adflight.com") ||
            dnsDomainIs(host, ".admonitor.net") ||
                // ...
            dnsDomainIs(host, "ads.x10.com") ||
            dnsDomainIs(host, "ads1.zdnet.com") ||
            dnsDomainIs(host, "ads2.zdnet.com") ||
            dnsDomainIs(host, "ads3.zdnet.com"))
        {
            // Replace the following with the address of the dummy web server
            //
            return "PROXY 192.168.1.5";
        }
    
        return "DIRECT";
    }

    Pointing it at a real web server also works (mostly), but some ad scripts go into infinite loops if they get 404 errors. And I don't want to pound a legitimate server with requests for ad content.

  • (disco)

    Yay - select all posts to move to another topic and no way of unselecting the 'closed' post from the old topic....

    [image]
  • (disco) in reply to PJH
    PJH:
    no way of unselecting the 'closed' post from the old topic....

    Glitch I suppose, since apparently you can't move it anyways.... ;)

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Glitch I suppose, since apparently you can't move it anyways...

    That was my point - it can be moved - that closed notice moved from the topic that I closed, along with the other posts I moved from it....

  • (disco) in reply to PJH
    PJH:
    that closed notice moved from the topic that I closed, along with the other posts I moved from it....

    Oh. Interesting, I didn't notice (point-in-time inference that apparently was not true). Well, it's... Special. Oh wait, no that's not right... um... Selecting Special Message? That's different... ;) :thumbsup:

  • (disco) in reply to Tsaukpaetra
    Tsaukpaetra:
    Selecting Special Message? That's different...

    You can't select (individually) a Special Message. But it nevertheless gets selected if you use select all. And since there's no interface to select it originally, there's, DiscoObviously, no interface to deselect it afterwards.

    [image]
  • (disco) in reply to accalia

    Some news site under Google News (Forbes I think) started giving a "You're using an Adblocker? Come back after you disable it... and then enjoy our LITE ADVERTISING experience!" (paraphrased)

    I switched to incognito (because I'm boss like that) and promptly enjoyed an ad that took half my screen, a video add on the right and another ton of "lite" advertising.

    It's now on my "Don't include" list in Google News.

    It's like they expect you to enjoy being surrounded by :shit: to get to their precious news story (that's 9 times out of 10 a close copy of everyone else's :shit:)

    Edit: Was definitely Forbes Forbes

  • (disco) in reply to WernerCD
    WernerCD:
    and promptly enjoyed an ad that took half my screen

    This reminds me - Wikipedia's recent attempt at fundraising resulted in this. Two screenshots because my mobile phone screen clearly isn't big enough...

    [image] [image]
  • (disco) in reply to WernerCD

    If you turned on incognito mode, the site had no way of knowing you were the same person who was just chided about using an ad-blocker. So... uh. Way to take a stand I guess?

  • (disco) in reply to WernerCD
    WernerCD:
    I switched to incognito (because I'm boss like that) and promptly enjoyed an ad

    Your adblock extension doesn't work in incognito mode?

    lol chrome.

    PJH:
    This reminds me - Wikipedia's recent attempt at fundraising resulted in this

    The Fuck you, Wikipedia topic is :arrows:.

  • (disco) in reply to John_Imrie
    John_Imrie:
    Add block plus

    Sheesh, you want to block adding and plus signs? Why are you so negative?

  • (disco) in reply to John_Imrie
    John_Imrie:
    No Script

    TRWTF is noscript.

    Seriously, everything runs on Javascript. Ad blockers are great, but disabling all javascript is like handcuffing yourself and trying to write Shakespeare.

    Also no, I'm not gonna do anything to make my site nice for noscripters. You don't want js, have fun with a plain html version of the site

  • (disco) in reply to sloosecannon

    You have to disable JavaScript, otherwise how could you come into tech forums like this one and bitch that sites don't work without JavaScript?

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    You have to manually enable an extension to work in incognito - which is a good thing.

  • (disco) in reply to WernerCD

    After you've installed an extension on your computer it's a bit late to decide that you don't trust it.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    that's not the point. incognito is great for debugging/developing if you leave it running completely vanilla. which sounds like exactly what happened here.

  • (disco) in reply to worc

    I got that point just fine. But when I want to test a site with AdBlock Plus disabled, I just disable it. It takes literally two clicks to disable, and two more to enable when I'm done.

  • (disco) in reply to anotherusername

    ctrl+shift+n is faster than fumbling for the mouse and digging through a menu!

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