Block me, block me

This post was written 4 years 4 months 2 days days old, so is a bit old now. Feel free to read and comment on this post, just remember some things change with time and any facts in this post may not be accurate anymore.

Ad-blockers. Browser plug-ins that get rid of website adverts. Nasty, annoying adverts. And Adblock Plus for Firefox is one of the most popular add-ons that you can get.

Except, of course, the reason why so much on the web is free is because they make some money from these adverts. Suppress them and they end of withdrawing the service or charging for it. Usually it’s the former.

The Copy+ website provides a unique, useful piece of software for free. Instead, we make money from licensing and from some non-evasive adverts at the top and bottom of each page. So, as I’m sure you can imagine, I’m not keen on ad-blockers.

However, I’ve had a number of Copy+ visitors reporting that with Adblock running the website doesn’t display properly. I’ve had a look and – yep – I can see it happening but sure as hell don’t know why (because I don’t know how Adblock is working).

So, I posted to the Adblock forum. Instead of some useful advice, I got criticism of my code. Yes, it was my fault. My fault that it worked perfectly fine with Adblock turned off but then didn’t with it turned on. Of course. How foolish of me.

So, guess what? That’s right – I’m going to change the site to detect Adblock and not let you on if you have it installed or turned on. The Adblock people could have just helped me work with it, but they weren’t prepared to. It’s only fair.