EasyList Forum

Zazzle is an eCommerce marketplace where customers can create their own products to buy or sell. For some reason AdBlock Plus makes some of the images of some products not load. These images are not advertisements. They are representations of the products themselves. But, I suspect that the titles chosen by the customers are triggering a false-positive response. Is there a way to whitelist? Zazzle.com itself does not host advertisements or run an advertising network.

Examples:

Page: https://www.zazzle.com/s/advertise

Has Blocked Content:

https://rlv.zcache.com/vintage_belgium_advertisement_travel_postcard-rc84e6df856fb4382bf54d0a567614b96_vgbaq_8byvr_324.jpg
https://rlv.zcache.com/advertising_brochure_beauty_rack_card-r4a85c25350a64d53b251888652771ad8_vgvr1_8byvr_324.jpg

Page: https://www.zazzle.com/vintage_belgium_advertisement_travel_postcard-239449757976708164

Has Blocked Content:

https://rlv.zcache.com/pipe_automobile_advertisement_belgium_postcard-r26c6dfeb6ef4419c9af6f88cad135d5a_vgbaq_8byvr_140.jpg
https://rlv.zcache.com/vintage_belgium_advertisement_travel_postcard-rc84e6df856fb4382bf54d0a567614b96_vgbaq_8byvr_540.jpg

Many more available upon request.

Happens to each item when someone has the words advertisement or advertising in their description. Logger screenshot.

Hi,
a better and fast solution is to fix it from your side.

Our customers decide what things are named. It seems pretty silly that we should have to give them a list of names not to use. Is this list even stable enough for that to work? What about words that mean "advertising" in different languages? I'm surprised that there is no white-list solution.

If it is a matter of compensation and/or a contractual agreement, I suspect we would be willing to agree in writing to never host advertisements and pay for the effort it takes to get this sorted out.

Yea I agree the images itself should not be blocked just because a person named the item itself advertisement. If someone wants to sell their correctly named vintage advertisement poster the current filters block the image of the item.

I tested with and that way the results and images are displayed correctly.

@lamonica Wait an EasyList author see your thread and decide what to do.

[mention]smed79[/mention], ok. How do I know if an Author has seen it?

I have co-workers asking if we should setup something to guide customers through the process of disabling their ad-blockers. That seems like a waste of time to me since it's hard to believe that this behavior is a goal of ad-blockers. I really think this is just a bug and not something intrinsic to ad-blockers that we should have to assist customers with.

Again: the best fix would be on your side. When you choose various names you can quickly check if are blocked / hidden by adblockers.
Otherwise you could wait weeks / months (for an easylist fix) for what is considered a minor issue.

[mention]intense[/mention],
Zazzle has roughly 5.5 billion URLs [1] that could potentially be affected. To process each one against the list to determine if it needs modification could take more than weeks. If the list changed during that time, we might even have to start over. Obviously, we would process the content in an intelligent order. But, I'm pretty sure the "let's just help our customers with ad-blockers work around this issue" crowd is likely to win-out over the "let's change our user's content" crowd.

I believe EasyList is professional enough to handle this quickly. But, it's worrying that you don't (since you are clearly more experienced than I).

Fingers crossed.

[1] English. As of the end of last year. The number is bigger if you count all the languages our customers speak and all the newer content.

If the site deploys more "advertising" file names, Zazzle will need to change it, not us. Once only commit;

https://github.com/easylist/easylist/co ... bef72eecc2

I could be reading it wrong, but that commit doesn't seem to be general enough to handle even the cases in this thread. Not to mention the fact that I suspect there are other words (besides "advertising" and "advertisement" that might trip up a Zazzle user).

Is the token "_advertisement_" an appropriate stand-in for all troublesome words?

tl;dr stop using the word "advertisement/advert".

I'm sorry my previous message was too long. Let me try a list.

1. "advert" and "advertisement" are not an exhaustive list of all the words we need to avoid. The real list is hard to work against because it changes and doesn't seem to handle foreign languages. Also, we have billions of URLs that are already in the wild that would need to be checked if we cannot be white-listed.

2. We don't choose the names of our products, our users do. We could give our these users a list of words to avoid. But, it would be out-of-date long before the product the user posts goes away.

3. We recognize your time is valuable and we are willing to compensate, assist, or do whatever needs to happen to fix this in a reasonable way. Would it be appropriate for us to send a pull-request?

Pull request added...
https://github.com/easylist/easylist/pull/939

[mention]fanboy[/mention], Let us know what you think!

Thank you [mention]fanboy[/mention]. You and your fellow list administrators are true unsung heroes of the Internet.