Guest wrote:Then I wonder why Giorgio changed his site when EasyList had his very first filters that did not break anything
I believe that he has every right to change the code of his site in order to make it less easy for ad-blocking-utilities to remove ads from his website.
I just expect him to be honest about it and to refrain from using malicious tactics while pursuing his goals.
Some actions, such as messing with the AdBlockPlus-code, are intolerable.
Some are bad style and capable of undermining the trust of people who may actually show (financial) support, example given: blocking Ghostery-notifications.
Trying to outwit adblockers on the other hand I only consider to be a (possibly bad) business decision - nothing else. It's not evil and in my eyes doesn't justify breaking a website with overly tight filter rules. Forcing ads upon freelancers may generate some extra income from ads, or maybe it rather pisses people off and doesn't encourage them to click on the ads, while making you lose feedback, donations, etc. Who can tell for sure?
I do understand, that filterlists are a problem to people whose business is based on ads. No longer is it just the skilled nerd, who blocks your ads, but more or less everyone starts doing it, because it's so easy. Even people who are actually not very bothered by the ads are beginning to block them, cause it requires no skills or effort. And when EasyList starts taking a more rigorous approach to blocking Giorgio's ads than it did in the past, I do understand, that he is concerned with the idea, that a lot of people, who subscribed to EasyList and possibly happily tolerated looking at his ads in the past, are now being lost as potential customers. Trying to bypass EasyList (in a white hat manner = modifying the website's code!) in the hope of winning back some potential customers at the price of pissing off more rigorous AdBlock-users who are likely to never contribute anyway, is not by default an absurd or inexcusable idea.
And this is definitely not a trivial, black-or-white topic.
When I said:
Another guest wrote:and not because Giorgio modified the code of his sites, but because Ares2's regular expressions got so universal, that collateral damage was inevitable.
I did not mean to give the impression, that no modifications have been made by Giorgio. He
did change the code. But in my opinion those code-changes were legitimate and no matter how frustrating they must have been to Ares2, I don't think it justified breaking regular functionality of the site by introducing über-tight blocking-rules to EasyList. It was not Giorgio's code, that ultimately broke the website, but the introduction of a new set of filtering rules. It's Ares2 who broke the site for AdBlockPlus users and not Giorgio.
The cat-and-mouse game that was going on is the daily business of advertisers and ad-blockers. I expect both sides to play fair and to be honest about their aims. Blocking ads so tightly, that regular functionality of a website is affected and accepting that as justifiable collateral damage is not something that I endorse and it is not something, that I believe to be in the interest of the majority of subscribers of EasyList.
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