How to Deal With Website That Has Sooo Many Irritating Ads Displayed? (screen, working)

[Chas863]

Thanks for all the suggestions. I just installed Adblock Plus about 30 minutes ago. Then I went to the website that was being overtaken by ads. With Adblock Plus, the number of ads was reduced substantially. They're not totally gone, but I can tolerate them at their present level.

Thanks again for the recommendations and comments.

[heavymind]

I use AdBlocker Premium in Firefox for general internet browsing. It's free and there are no intrusive or distracting ads on the majority of websites (City Data, Youtube, my local newspaper, etc). When I encounter websites where you get a popup because of your adblocker I usually just leave the site. The way the internet is going this isn't going to last forever, eventually all the heavy hitter websites will be pay to play or subscription access only.

Firefox also has a simple reader view that works on most websites, if all you want to do is read the content without seeing any ads or images. It's good for printing web pages without all the crap (recipes, instructions, etc) https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...free-web-pages

For anything related to Google apps (Gmail, Drive, etc) I use Chrome with no Adblocker.

Sometimes when I happen to visit random websites using Chrome I'm shocked at the number of ads, it literally looks like a comical circus. Totally unusable and a huge turnoff if I were to become a customer. If you walked into a brick & mortar store and was instantly greeted with a bunch of signs in your face and being shouted at by salespeople, would you keep going or turn around and leave?

[SanyBelle]

the Today Show website is the same, the ad takes up the top half of the screen and then there are ads on the bottom right. They are one site that makes me turn off my ad blocker if I want to view them, I usually click it closed quickly since I'm not fighting that:

https://www.today.com/popculture/hod...CRJvP915Ih6tHk

[heavymind]

I remember when the internet used to be fun and user-friendly, without a million pop up screens asking you to sign up or subscribe.

[Mircea]

Originally Posted by Chas863

There is one discussion board website that I find very interesting, and I go to it fairly often. I've gone there for many years. However, about a year or so ago the website was sold to a different owner.

Now the website has so many ads plastered on it that it is becoming difficult to read the content that I go there for in the first place.

Use an ad-blocker. If I have to "white-list" then I don't use that site and I need to use it because there are always dozens if not 100s of alternatives.

[rodentraiser]

Same with newspaper sites. It seem like every time I want to read a story, I get told to turn the adblocker off. I just leave the site. There are plenty of places to read the news and there is no site is so much better than another that I feel the need to turn my adblocker off. Screw 'em. Looking at you, Washington Post.

[heavymind]

Originally Posted by rodentraiser

Same with newspaper sites. It seem like every time I want to read a story, I get told to turn the adblocker off. I just leave the site. There are plenty of places to read the news and there is no site is so much better than another that I feel the need to turn my adblocker off. Screw 'em. Looking at you, Washington Post.

Newspaper sites are the worst offenders. I understand that they need revenue and very few readers buy printed papers now, so how about a compromise? Have a lite version displaying the general news, like one paragraph with the basic facts. Then offer full stories and features to those who have subscriptions.

I hate it when I click on a news link here and get slapped in the face with an adblocker popup or subscription requirement. They lose me completely.

[Amontillado]

One technique I learned about is usable if you have a button on your computer which turns Wifi off, "airplane mode" as they might call it. You go to the site you want, and the instant that the material appears on the screen, you kill the Wifi link. That means that by the time the site recognizes your ad blocker, you've cut off its ability to block your screen. I sometimes use that, and it works a lot of the time.

Facebook is very aggressive about making sure that everyone sees advertising, but there's a special dedicated adblocker to deal with it, called F.B. Purity, or Fluff Busting. You install it as a browser extension, and it has a fairly complex set of menus that you can use to decide which Facebook features you do or don't want to block. F.B. Purity works pretty well, but there seems to be an arms race going on between it and Facebook, where they periodically change their software to disable it, and the guy who wrote it gets to work and produces a new version that circumvents Facebook's fix. He responds much faster than Facebook does, so there are long intervals between changes by Facebook, and updates to F.B. Purity come within a couple of days.

[chiluvr1228]

Have you tried DuckDuckGo as a browser?

[TaxPhd]

Adblock is a start, but it is far, far away from a 100% solution.

The much better solution is to acquire a Raspberry Pi and set up a Pi-Hole. YouTube videos will provide you with all the information you need to get it done.