Ad blocking in OmniWeb

[Allan Dreyer Andersen]

Hi David, Sak and everybody participated to this thread

Thanks a lot for all your feedback. It has been very helpfull and now my ad blocking list is a lot better than before .
I'm not perfect to ad blocking, but your feedback pushed me in the right direction.

Thanks!
Allan Dreyer Andersen

-------------------------
Orginal besked:
Fra: David Joslin <davidjoslin at mac.com>
Til: omniweb-l at omnigroup.com
Dato: torsdag, 01 september 2005 04:06
Emne: Re: Ad blocking in OmniWeb
OW blocks the image if the pattern matches any part of the URL.   You  
don't have to match the entire URL, so I think those two patterns  
will do  the same thing.  (Actually one would block URLs that had  
zero slashes after ".com", the other wouldn't, but otherwise they  
should be the same.)

So for the example given below, I would probably just put the pattern:
adlegend
in the block list.  The downside is that it's possible that some site  
I would want to see would have a url with the string "adlegend"  
somewhere in it, but that seems unlikely and I could fix it easily if  
it happened.  The upside is that if adlegend.com decides to serve ads  
from "media2.adlegend.com" or "ads.adlegend.com", etc., they're still  
blocked and I don't have to keep adding new patterns.

My ad blocking list looks something like this:
/ads\.
/ads/
banners

and so on, plus a few that that are more specific.  Just "ads" would  
be a bad pattern, since it would match words that contain that string  
anywhere, such as a URL containing "gradstudents".   Another useful  
pattern is:
[0-9][0-9]x[0-9][0-9]
since a lot of ad images have their dimensions included in the image  
name, such as:
http://us.a1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/a/ho/honda/Civic_728x90_083005.gif
In this case, the pattern matches just the "28x90" part of the url.   
It occasionally blocks images that I do want to see, but much, much  
less often than it blocks ads.

I also turn off Flash Player in the plugins pref panel.  That kills  
some of the most annoying ads of all.


On Aug 31, 2005, at 9:46 AM, Sak wrote:

> Oops, thanks Christopher.  That's what I get for not checking my  
> work at 5am.
>
> Thanks,
> Sak.
>
> On Aug 31, 2005, at 9:36 AM, Christopher Bort wrote:
>
>>>
>>> http://media\.adlegend\.com/*
>>>
>>>
>>
>> That wouldn't be very useful, as it would match "http:// 
>> media.adlegend.com"
>> followed by any number of slashes (///////). I think you want:
>>
>> http://media\.adlegend\.com/.*
>>
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