I always thought that if people had ad blockers there was no way to show them ads. I was reading yesterday in PC World a letter and thought you guys might want to read it.

"A disturbing new trend is poping up, so to speak, on the Web. I've been running an ad blocker for a few months now, to great effect blocking every piece of unwanted nonsense Web sites try to throw at me. But recently, Amazon.com began to crash everytime I used their search page, and hondas automobile site would not even come up. Other sites, mostly big corperate ones, acted similerly. I discovered that if I disabled the ad blocker the sites were happy again. More specificaly, some sites wouldnt work unless I disabled either animation or pop-up blocking. "

The guy wrote a little more but it wasnt anything interesting. Anybody know how these big companies are blocking the ad blockers?

I have Norton Internet Security which happens to come with an ad blocker. I had never used one before but it works pretty well. Only problem is sometimes I get the annoying little IE error page inside where an IFRAME style ad was meant to go. This is a pain cuz you have to click the back button twice if you wanna go back a page. I say let people have their ad blockers without trying to mess them up. Don't invade my home any more than is done already.
-dk

It could be a problem specific only to his ad-blocker...

Without actual testing, or more specific details about the circumstances, including settings, code, and other things, it's hard to say.

It might be a bit of javascript that checks for a boolean TRUE set by a bit of code in, say, a child window, and perhaps passes on a value of FALSE to subsequent pages via querystring. Or it could be something else. Depends, really.

<edit> I have to add: I hope you want to know this so you won't have problems with your ad-blocker. If you want to try to block the ad-blockers in your site(s), I agree with dk — not a good idea to try to get around this.

Ad-blocking is an interesting topic. I'm not a supporter of advertising, especially a lot of the spam etc. I see on the internet every day. I don't agree with ad-blockers, though.

My personal opinion is that unsolicited advertising is wrong. Spam is wrong. Excessive popups or sending you to a site you didn't request is wrong. I do belive that every website owner has the right to place advertising on their pages and that the only way people should use to block this is to not visit the website. Why should you get something for free and take away that person's source of income? Adverts on web pages are the same as those on TV, they pay for the content, and if you don't like the adverts, its only fair to not use the content...

Again, I don't agree with unsolicited advertising, but I don't believe ad-blockers are fair on the website owners.

Ahh just to make a correction on my ad blocker. It does not take off all advertisements. You can set the different levels of blocking but I don't think it can ever get it all (plus some is obviously text). I do think advertising is necissary but the Chevy Blazer that rolls across my screen when I used to go to yahoo was just too much to handle.
-dk

I wasnt going to try to block ad-blockers on my site. I was just interested in the fact that it could be done. I also wanted to find out how. My view of advertising is pop-ups of any kind are wrong and email spam is wrong. SpyWare is wrong. The only kind of advertising I think is ok is the basic image ads.

Hi bubbles,

Why are pop-ups wrong? Nowadays, they are almost essential to a site's survival. I would find it normal if each page of a website had one pop-up, but on some pages I see four or five. But I think the worst are those sites that automatically download things onto your computer. In my opinion, that's going way too far.

Popups are bad for the same reason that inaccesible pages are bad. A basic philosophy behind the internet is to give the user as much control as possible, while still keeping the content presented well. Popups impose material upon the user, forcing them to change their own surfing habits.

The internet wasn't meant to be a big commercial playground with advertisers and marketeers running rife, changing the way people do things. It was only meant to be a fluid medium to transfer information.

Woops wrong choice of words. I guess what I mean is I'm against more then 2 pop-ups per page. I aslo dont like most the dhtml ads.