543264 - Omnibus ad-blocking bug for February 2010

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Camino Graveyard :: Annoyance Blocking, defect)

Description

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Once upon an ad…

Comment 1

[philippe (part-time)]

On some forums (vBulletin 4.0.1), forum post appear empty.
The div wrapping the message body:
<div class="content has_ad">

blocked by div[class$="_ad"], 

http://www.bikeforums.net/
http://www.monachos.net/

As reported in the forums
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1726625
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=1731945

Comment 2

[philippe (part-time)]

The ads (googleads afaict) in the affected blocks are wrapped in class="floatedAd" and already blocked.

Comment 3

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Attachment: Preliminary Omnibus Patch

This fixes the vBulletin "has_ad" issue, which has the potential to be fairly widespread (1Password forums have the class on their divs without even having ads!).  It also blocks the ads inside the formerly-missing posts on bikeforum.net.

I'll leave this for a few days before asking for review to see if any other ads to be blocked come up before the end of the month, but I wanted to get this patch up here now so that I don't forget to get it in at the end of the month if I get bogged down later in the week.

Comment 4

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

We need to get this in 1.6.11, too.

Comment 5

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #2)
> The ads (googleads afaict) in the affected blocks are wrapped in
> class="floatedAd" and already blocked.

They weren't in my testing, which is why I added that rule.

From today's double-checking, I've also added div[class^="googleAdBlock"] to take out some additional right-hand column ads on bikeforums (the right-hand column ads seem to alternate between Flash and Google). I checked both threads today and got Flash on the right in one and some different Google ads on the right in the other.

Comment 6

[Chris Lawson (gone)]

A monstrosity on the NYTimes:

<!-- ADXINFO classification="interstitial-multimedia" campaign="i_int-PRLFashionWeek03_1254154_nyt8"--><!-- BEGIN RICH-MEDIA ShortTail Media CODE -->
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
rnum=Math.round(Math.random() * 100000);
ts=String.fromCharCode(60);
if (window.self != window.top) {nf=''} else {nf='NF/'};
document.write(ts+'script src="http://ads.shorttail.net/cgi-bin/ads/ad17922k.cgi/v=2.3S/sz=1x1A/'+rnum+'/'+nf+'RETURN-CODE/JS/">'+ts+'/script>');
</script><noscript><a href="http://ads.shorttail.net/ads/ad17922k-map.cgi/ns/v=2.3S/sz=1x1A/" target="_top">
<img src="http://ads.shorttail.net/cgi-bin/ads/ad17922k.cgi/ns/v=2.3S/sz=1x1A/" border="0" alt="Click Here" /></a>
</noscript>
<!-- END ShortTail Media CODE -->

It showed up as blocked Flash floating over everything; blocking "ads.shorttail.net" is probably what we want to do here. (Not sure why "/ads/" isn't causing it to be blocked already, but whatever.)

cl

Comment 7

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> A monstrosity on the NYTimes:
[...] 
> It showed up as blocked Flash floating over everything; blocking
> "ads.shorttail.net" is probably what we want to do here. (Not sure why "/ads/"
> isn't causing it to be blocked already, but whatever.)

I have no idea what that is, because there's no Flash at all in the snippet, and the embedded URLs all redirect to an empty .gif file (and browsing the NYTimes doesn't trigger any such Flash for me.)

Comment 8

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Attachment: Feb 2010 Omnibus ad-blocking, v2

Now with fixes for comment 5 and bug 545942 (where blocking really horked the layout of the poorly-designed macwelt.de but which was fixable thanks to some CSS from philippe).

Comment 9

[Stuart Morgan]

Comment on attachment 429447 [details] [diff] [review]
Feb 2010 Omnibus ad-blocking, v2

sr=smorgan

Comment 10

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Landed on cvs trunk.

Comment 11

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

I'm not exactly sure what we want to do here for 1.6.11; we'll need to build before the typical 10 days-2 weeks have passed, but we really want to get the vBulletin fix on 1.6.11 before we EOL it.

I guess I'm inclined to let this patch bake this week and then land it on the 18branch.

Comment 12

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Landed this on the MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH (and the CAMINO_2_0_BRANCH, so as not to leave things hanging).