Yahoo mail and their irritating/sleazy ad tactics

General discussion about the NoScript extension for Firefox
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gxi
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Mar 27, 2019 2:52 pm

Yahoo mail and their irritating/sleazy ad tactics

Post by gxi »

I've used Yahoo mail, the free version, since dogs could talk, as it were. NoScript with Firefox cleans up the mail pages quite a bit. The average human being - above 20-something anyway - has a hard time reading and composing mail with a flash/video ad running next to it. :twisted:

But Yahoo has, of course, gotten very devious in its attempts to encourage free users to switch to paid ad-free accounts. Currently they put an ad, which looks like an email title, above the first line of email on the email list page. I've been seeing gibberish such as "Amazon.com AD YAMAZAKI home Tosca Key Rack". I haven't clicked on that crap, don't know if there is such a product (doubtful!) and I don't know if it has anything to do with Amazon, but it apparently is there specifically to annoy users enough to switch to a paid account.

After the gibberish ad campaign started, I began clicking the drop-down arrow on the right which gives options "Why this ad?" and "I don't like this ad." Clicking on the latter produces a box stating "before you close this ad, tell us why you don't like it" then 4 options; 3 are prefilled plus a blank line to fill in your own. If you choose the first option, "Offensive", or any of the others for that matter, that produces a prompt to sign up for a paid ad-free account. Then the same ad reappears next time you bring up the email list. Therefore, using the "I don't like this ad" sham tool simply tells the ad software to keep putting it there.

So you can right-click on the ad in Firefox, select Inspect Element, drill down, and these appear to be culprits:

Code: Select all

https://cdn.doubleverify.com
https://beap.gemini.yahoo.com
Adding the first to NoScript Settings, then blocking it, has made the gibberish intermittent, but the 2nd domain needs to be blocked too, and I'm prevented from doing that in NoScript Setting for some reason. Any suggestions?
Last edited by barbaz on Wed Mar 27, 2019 9:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reason: kill board-generated links
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:66.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0
barbaz
Senior Member
Posts: 10841
Joined: Sat Aug 03, 2013 5:45 pm

Re: Yahoo mail and their irritating/sleazy ad tactics

Post by barbaz »

Have you tried entering it without the https? (i.e. just "beap.gemini.yahoo.com")
*Always* check the changelogs BEFORE updating that important software!
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