Ask HN: Blacklist Forbes?

164 points by willwhitney 10 years ago | 41 comments

Would it be possible to blacklist forbes.com links? They now block viewers who are using ad blockers, and have recently been serving advertising malware to visitors [1].

They also have awful interstitial ads [2] and, while they masquerade as a news organization, are actually a blog farm [3].

Blocking Forbes would be no great loss in terms of content, and would avoid a surprising amount of advertising- (and malware-) generated pain.

[1]: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware

[2]: <any Forbes article, e.g. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2016/01/08/meet-the-queen-of-imgur-the-image-sharing-site-thats-half-the-size-of-twitter/ >

[3]: https://np.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3zs6qk/gq_and_forbes_go_after_ad_blocker_users_rather/cyp2uls?context=3#cyowy51

StevePerkins 10 years ago |

This seems to be becoming a lot more common.

Whenever I search for answers to Go-related questions, a website called "socketloop.com" is always the top search result. Although they have extraordinary SEO when it comes to serving content to Google or Bing crawlers, they don't serve traffic AT ALL to browsers with AdBlock installed.

Really frustrating... that blog site is turning into the "expertsexchange.com" of Go. I would rather just have its links excluded from my search results altogether. The crazy thing is that it's a one-man WordPress-like niche blog, for which I'd be shocked if it drew more than a few hundred bucks A YEAR in ad revenue anyway.

shpx 10 years ago | |

> I would rather just have its links excluded from my search results altogether

You can. Google offers a personal block list extension. For chrome at least.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/personal-blocklist...

zer 10 years ago | |

You could also disable JavaScript for socketloop. Works fine for me.

sologoub 10 years ago | |

Just visited socketloop.com and seems to work fine. Using Focus by Firefox for blocking.

malmsteen 10 years ago | |

just press escape before it's fully loaded. Works fine with adblock + mublock

nhebb 10 years ago |

There's already a built in solution for this on HN:

- Upvote posts you like.

- Do not upvote posts you don't like.

- Use 'Flag' judiciously for content that you feel is not appropriate to HN.

- Let the HN ranking algorithm do its work.

codegeek 10 years ago |

I agree. Had a really shocking experience when I tried to visit a link and they kept telling me to "turn off ad blockers" to provide a better experience.

tptacek 10 years ago |

I don't like Forbes and can't remember a single Forbes submission on HN that I've gotten any value from, but this is just one in a long list of sites people believe should be banned from HN for reasons other than the content that they publish.

I don't think this is a can of worms anyone really wants to open.

If you don't want to unwittingly visit Forbes, edit your /etc/hosts file.

eli 10 years ago |

I'd prefer to decide for myself whether I want to click a link, thanks.

I'm sure you can find a suitable plugin or HOSTS file modification that will prevent you from accessing forbes.com even accidentally.

kriegslustig 10 years ago |

Is it possible? Of course it is! From their current site I gathered these domains (these are the ones uBlock doesn't block by default):

forbes.com

forbesimg.com

forbes_video.edgesuite.net

app-ab13.marketo.com

If you're using uBlock Origin you can simply click on the uBlock-icon on the top left in your browser, click on the grey bar on top of the box that opened, go to "My Filters" and insert the above snippet into the text box.

Edit: formatting

kiiski 10 years ago | |

I'm pretty sure he was talking about blacklisting forbes.com links on HN.

kriegslustig 10 years ago | | |

Oh, now that makes more sense. Sorry! Anyway blacklisting their content in the browser might be nice too.

alexivanovs 10 years ago |

Seems like a VERY bold move, and something tells me that a lot of other sites are going to follow this idea, in many ways because it validates what others have been feeling already for so long; the loss of potential revenue.

I encountered this for the first time earlier today, and had to come back to the screen that tells you to turn it off at least 3 times, one can hope that it was just a 'temporary' hold to lure people in the idea, but no -- it's the real deal!

paulus_magnus2 10 years ago |

To lawyers here: if my PC gets infected on Forbes, who is liable? Forbes or the AD provider or ???

junto 10 years ago | |

Probably should be a chain, so you sue Forbes, Forbes sues the ad network and the network sues the advertiser.

In reality, Forbes lawyers would beat you with a big stick and demonstrate that their public terms and conditions that nobody reads, absolve themselves from any responsibility!

rubyfan 10 years ago | | |

I'm not sure I buy that having a terms page and me viewing some other page on their site constitutes an agreement that absolves Forbes.com from liability or protects them from you suing them.

ErikVandeWater 10 years ago | |

I believe this is an example where all parties in the chain from malware>Ad network>Forbes can be held liable. You could decide to sue any and all parties that delivered the malware /biz law 101 guess

recursive 10 years ago |

I don't use an ad-blocker to avoid problems like this. Why should ad blockers be considered the default state?

gpvos 10 years ago | |

Things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10870892

recursive 10 years ago | | |

Serving malware seems like a much more serious problem. That sounds like a good reason for banning by itself, regardless of what they do to ad blockers.

greggarious 10 years ago |

Many websites serve malvertising, blocking Forbes would just give readers a false sense of security.

gue5t 10 years ago |

Agreed. Forbes is a mainstream news source and doesn't belong on HN anyway. They don't have articles of technical substance about computer hacking.

Edit: It'd be nice if the folks downvoting would take the time to explain how they feel about this topic. Are there Forbes articles that actually pertain to the act of computer hacking, and not just modern (computerized) business?

danbower 10 years ago | |

I didn't downvote you but I'll give my thoughts.

Firstly there's been quite a few articles posted to HN that aren't even technology related, let alone being of proper substance, yet are still of interest to HN readers. For example I have fond memories reading through a bee keeping article posted here and the discussion that followed. Due to the popularity of that article and others like it, I think it's fair to say the readership isn't fixed on the idea that all articles must even be strictly technology related. Secondly you'll notice that BBC articles get posted here quite often and that's absolutely a mainstream news source.

detaro 10 years ago | |

Because HN is not (just) for articles about computer hacking.

First paragraph of the Guidelines:

What to Submit

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

funkyy 10 years ago |

I concur - as of late you can easily buy articles on Forbes decreasing its quality and neutrality.

deusu 10 years ago |

I agree.

But I would go even farther. Block every site where you won't be able to read the content without having Javascript enabled. I have experienced several blogs where you won't see anything without Javascript.

hhsnopek 10 years ago | |

That's a little much considering all of the sites that are well beyond static content and must load using RESTful requests. This would completely removing a lot of the web. Maybe if everyone used static sites as the standard when it came to huge sites, mainly corporate; then I would agree.

All in all, blocking all sites that load their content would be insane scraping and more than a handful of problems.

deusu 10 years ago | | |

I don't know what technology these blogs are using, but on the occasions where I looked at the HTML-source, the content was there. It just didn't show with Javascript disabled.

Yes, you can use Javascript to make things prettier. I have no problem with that. But not showing content that is actually there, that's a no-go for me.

danmaz74 10 years ago | |

Why should I be deprived of interesting content that requires javascript to be viewed? If you don't want javascript, it's your problem, not mine.

ashwinb10 10 years ago | |

Isn't this a bit extreme? Many websites use client-side rendering via frameworks like Angular, React, etc.

currysausage 10 years ago | | |

I find it extreme if a site requires JavaScript + hundreds of kilobytes of frameworks in order to display some text. But you're right, such a measure would probably hide useful content from HN users, thus making HN itself less useful.

adrusi 10 years ago | | |

The point is that for delivering document content like articles to browsers, client side rendering is inferior, and they should be depending on angular or react to render the content.

I do think it's a little extreme to ban sites that do this, but I also don't think that sites should do it and if banning them from HN means they won't then maybe that's not so crazy. I don't think banning them from HN will help, though.

EvanPlaice 10 years ago | |

This is about blocking one malicious actor.

Not going all out Richard Stallman. Everybody knows, you never go full Richard Stallman.

pan69 10 years ago |

The New York Times is another one I can think of. I'm not against pay walls or ad blocking, but if, as a content provider, you choose to implement these sorts of "devices" than you can at least expect your content not to be shared around any more on link sites such as HN, i.e. you're not serving the community on those websites any more, your serving your customers. Which is fine, but I'm not your customer.

When ever I see a pay wall on HN these days, I "flag" it.

blacksmythe 10 years ago | |

I believe if you flag too many articles, HN takes away your flagging privilege.

relkor 10 years ago | | |

You have to speak up, although it is a chorus of voices that is the will of the community, each voice is necessary. Do not be afraid of speaking your opinion for fear of loosing a button on the internet that you can press.

Tomte 10 years ago | |

You're abusing the flag mechanism. Stop doing that.