EasyList Forum

A message from an eBay employee (reached me indirectly, so I cannot ask more questions):

I have a pressing question regarding a recent
update to Adblock Plus' Easylist banner blocking strings. They have (as
of 4th March) pushed out an update that blocks *.ebayrtm.* URLs.

The issue we're having is that *.ebayrtm.* serves up content within the
eBay site, not off it. The content it serves are not adverts, but
targeted messages to users. For example:

* Recently purchased items on a my-eBay mini window
* On-site campaign messages, specific to eBay (not third parties)
* Browser download targeting (for example, the eBay Companion is
messaged via the *.ebayrtm.* domain)

As such, the whole site experience is significantly changed with this,
and the site appears as if there are errors.

As mentioned, this is eBay targeting on the site, rather than off the
site.

I must say, I am somewhat confused - EasyList doesn't have generic blocking for ebayrtm, there are two specific filters for this domain. Both didn't change recently, so I don't know where "4th March" comes from. But maybe you can see the breakage he mentions.

I tried to figure out what the blocked scripts do. An example page: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0323806932

If you look at "Buyer protection on eBay", it is empty. If you disable ".ebayrtm.com/rtm?rtmcmd&a=json" however, you will see
http://pics.ebaystatic.com/aw/pics/payp ... brella.gif. Same happens with "Buy safely" instructions above. Why this kind of information is being inserted dynamically is beyond me.

Another change from the same script is an internal ad (e.g. http://rtm.ebaystatic.com/0/RTMS/Image/ ... 112x22.gif) appearing in the upper-right corner. Then you have http://rtm.ebaystatic.com/0/RTMS/Image/ ... 160x22.gif appearing in the header next to "Shops" - apparently internal advertising again. "Make no payments & pay no interest for 3 months with an eBay MasterCard" - yet another piece of internal advertising, this time immediately above article description. And one 1x1 iframe pointing to tags.bluekai.com without any content, apparently tracking (on other pages this spot is used for more internal advertising, 160x600 format).

If I look at the main page, it seems that this script has no useful payload whatsoever. It is all dedicated to internal advertising - three Flash objects, six image ads.

My eBay page: two internal ads (same ones as on the auction pages).

To sum up: so far the only useful functionality that I see blocked is buyer protection info but I fail to see changed/broken site experience. Given that ebayrtm is typically used for internal advertising (including some that it is pretty annoying) and that blocking these ads individually will require significantly more effort - I cannot confirm that we have a false positive here. But maybe somebody knows where I can find "my-eBay mini window".

I find it odd that this person would bring up a generic *.ebayrtm.* that (like you said) I don't have in the list. Even stranger is the fact that nothing has been added/modified with those strings for quite some time ... they are not new. No one else has complained of any false-positives from there for months.

I don't have a string in the EasyList named *.ebayrtm.*. I realized a lonnnng time ago that I could not just use *.ebayrtm.* as it DID create false-positives. He needs to check where that generic string is coming from ....it's not from me

non-ad: ad:

how about something like this,

Fanboy, whay you quote as "non-ad" has mostly ad content in it. Looks like this link is coming from an auction page, see above for a detailed analysis of what that script inserts into the page.

PS: The "callback" parameter is a reference to the code that will be processing the results - it doesn't have any influence on the data being returned.

I agree.
If I remember correctly, I used the *callback* info before ,,, but it did not yield the expected results. It seemed it was just a part of the "called" code and was really not part of the blocking solution.