Adblock developer offers 'please unblock me' tag to sites
Found on The Register on Monday, 11 May 2009
Fresh from a bizarre food fight with rival Giorgio Maone of NoScript, Adblock Plus developer Wladimir Palant has offered an olive branch to publishers - and along with it, an opportunity for his users to show that they're not a bunch of parasitic freeloaders.
His solution is based on the premise that "most users don't want to deny webmasters their income", and involves the addition of a tag to a page's source code, requesting that the user unblock ads for the particular site.
Adblock will look for this tag, check to see whether the user visits this site regularly, and then display a notification.
Oh yes, this is going to work just perfectly. Just like SMTP never was abused to deliver spam, just like the metatags never were abused to push sites up in search engines, just like marquee never was abused to annoy users with blinking text, just like window.open never was abused to flood users with pop-ups. Face it: if you give advertisers a way to deliver a message, they will abuse it.