Blocking the Ad Blocker Blockers

I am hugely interested and invested in changing advertising on the web, and well everywhere, to better server consumers and advertisers. The current style of online advertising is broken, and must change. I am not the only one who can see the writing on the wall.

My ideas are going to take a while to build, so in the meantime I am hacking my own experience, beyond adding an ad blocker. More on that down the page a ways.

Why? Well, things I dislike even more than ads, are passive aggressive and accusatory messages from sites that want to insist my ad blocking is a real problem, not their intrusive, invasive, abrasive, malware ridden, clickbait advertising partners.

One of my favorite sites that does this so spectacularly is wired.com, with a nice full page, let me stop you right here, takeover screen. Hey its your site, and your content, and if you want monetize your content that way, go for it. I don’t have to stay, and no, I wont be white listing you.

I have white listed a few sites, out of sheer respect for how they asked me to, but those are few and far between. I do believe there are OK and safe ads out there, but I also need to really trust that whoever is running the site. I am also most certainly not paying money to a site that offers an ultimatum like wired does.

I am a big fan of the google contributor program, even though it makes about as much sense to get everyone to use that, as everyone to turn off ad blocking. I have been using since it came out and plan on continuing that until google inevitably axes it.

I see wired articles all the time on my geeky news feed sites, I end up not paying attention to what site I am going to and clicking on links to read their take on the latest breaking news. I start scrolling only to get punched in the face with their anti-ad-block campaign and close out and move on with my life, shaking my head at them for once again conditioning me to loath their site. So they get to be my test dummy. Thanks guys!

I had an idea a while back to create some sort of open source peer to peer blockchain dns catchphrase here service that would let me and other people share a list of sites to block, and redirect somewhere else. I don’ have time or know how (yet) on how to do this, or even the right way to do it, so I am just going to roll my own hack solution for now.

The simplest way to do this would be to block the site with your host file, or redirect it to a page you host locally, reminding you why you didn’t get to the site.

# Send these bad boys packing for home
127.0.0.1 wired.com
127.0.0.1 www.wired.com

I liked this idea, but wanted to extend it to redirect to a public website, so if anyone else wanted to use it they could. I could have just thrown a site up on digital ocean and pointed offensive domains to its IP in my host file, but I really wanted to point it at a domain, so I wouldn’t be locked into one IP address. Since the host file doesn’t have an equivalent to cname pointers, and is more like, well exactly setting an A record that overrides my other dns settings, I would have to use something else too.

I was googling around and reading up on the subject of using your host file to do wacky things, and saw someone suggest using Nginx web server to take requests to matching domains and send them elsewhere, and I really liked this idea. Made me think that maybe later I could wrap it into a program that would give you an interface to add sites to that you want to redirect and it would do the rest for you. Cool idea bro.

Next I needed to have Nginx (which you should say as “Engine X” despite En-Gen-icks being more fun) listen on port 80 for any requests to any domains listed in server_name. Quick conf file edit:

server {
      listen   80;
      server_name  www.wired.com wired.com;
      access_log off;
      location / {
          proxy_pass http://adblocker.benmcnelly.horse;
          proxy_set_header    Host            $host;
          proxy_set_header    X-Real-IP       $remote_addr;
          proxy_set_header    X-Forwarded-for $remote_addr;
          proxy_connect_timeout 300;
      }
    }

You could do this differently to act more like a pointer, where it redirects completely to my custom domain. But I wanted my browser to show the original site I was trying to get to, so I made it more complicated. To do that I will need my domain’s dns set up to handle the incoming wired.com domain request as well. Its a bit more work but I like it.

For it work with any path (wired.com/somepath/) I need to do a little hacking on my sites Apache settings or the .htaccess file, in this case I use the rewrite engine to make any path resolve the index.html file. I also need to make any local resources linked in my page will have the full url instead of relative paths, so it wont break. In my .htaccess file on the sites server:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule . index.html [L]

TL;DR,
Whenever I visit a site on my naughty list, I get redirected to a page that reminds me why I blocked them. This was accomplished in a long and convoluted way.

OK that does it for now, and I look forward to adding to this list as needed. I know there are better ways to do this, but hey If anyone want to make some software that makes it easier for people to do this, you have my blessing. I look forward to installing your Adblocker Blocker Blocker Super Plus toolbar.