> I'll say again, if sites make it clear I'm not welcome without viewing their ads, I won't go.
Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable, they could be trying ten different ways to detect if you are blocking ads so they can display a note that you aren't allowed to view the content, and you would likely never know.
Or do you think they should put a banner at the top of ever page, inconveniencing every user just so the ones that don't want to view ads and are running ad-blockers have a chance to notice the content producers don't want them skipping the ads, after purposefully blocking their ability to determine if the message applies to them specifically?
Or how about we just assume that if a site attempts to display ads then they intend their users to view them? Is that too crazy to assume?
You are correct, in that currently it's a feature of anti-adblock killer and some other scripts/plugins with a similar goal, and I was conflating some comments about an adblock detector[1] and it's inability to detect ublock initially (most likely because it wasn't trying). My apologies.
That said, I don't think we're that far away from ad-blockers blocking detection. As soon as some large sites detect and bypass ad-blocks by moving to a ad source in those cases (or displaying ads in some other manner), ad-blockers will be forced to prevent detection to fulfill their purpose.
One of the reasons technical people use ad-blockers is because they don't want to download 10 MB of crap for a 300-word page. "The customer hasn't downloaded our crap" should be trivially detectable.
The people displaying the content (the site) and the people providing the "crap" (the ad company) are often different entities, with different servers. This is why ads are often served with javascript. Since the scripts that load the ads can change, as they are deployed by the ad company, there's not always a definitive way to know what you can expect to exist. Additionally, since there are exchanges and aggregators, you can't always be sure the same ad company is providing the script. This could be normalized, but anything that makes it easy to detect that the ad has been loaded form the page is probably also easy to detect from the ad-blocker, and trace back to something that needs to be removed.
Considering a needed mechanism for an ad-blocker to function is to be undetectable, they could be trying ten different ways to detect if you are blocking ads so they can display a note that you aren't allowed to view the content, and you would likely never know.
Or do you think they should put a banner at the top of ever page, inconveniencing every user just so the ones that don't want to view ads and are running ad-blockers have a chance to notice the content producers don't want them skipping the ads, after purposefully blocking their ability to determine if the message applies to them specifically?
Or how about we just assume that if a site attempts to display ads then they intend their users to view them? Is that too crazy to assume?