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About the AdBlocker message on Winaero

If you use Ad Blockers, you must be seeing a message that Winaero doesn't function properly with it. Some readers think that after all these years, I want more ad revenue and want to force them to disable ad blockers. Let me assure you that it's not true.

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Update: The issue is now resolved with this commit. Thanks to everyone who was involved in this. Don't forget to update your EasyList subscription in ad blocker in order to restore the site's appearance.

The only problem here is a defective malformed rule implemented in EasyList, a popular subscription that is enabled by default in each and every ad blocker.

A few days ago I received several reports from readers that the front page is "broken". I was surprised to find that any ad blocker with EasyList literally wipes out everything from the front page, recent posts, popular posts - ALL. I had no choice but to inform my readers that the site is not broken, and that is not my fault. Here is how it looks without my message.

Winaero With Easylist

See the yellow area. It is empty, while it was supposed to look like this:

Winaero Default
The malformed rule erases the generic markup from the page, and can easily turn the whole web site into a blank page - exactly what you see now.

Please don't get me wrong. I am OK with ad blockers

I personally use uBlock Origin everywhere. I also think if users want to have ads blocked, then they should have that choice. And you have always had that choice on my website, even though my revenue goes down if you use blockers. Until it was only blocking ads, everything was fine.

But breaking the site's look and its features for no reason is not acceptable. The blocked content had nothing harmful and didn't contain ads. There were links to my internal pages.

The EasyList maintainers should review their rules and fix this, and restore the original appearance of the front page on Winaero.

Here is the link to the commit that breaks my site: GitHub.

So I prefer to display a message here instead of having visitors constantly reporting that the site doesn't work.

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Author: Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube.

13 thoughts on “About the AdBlocker message on Winaero”

    1. Yes they seem to have selectively targeted Winaero while excluding the exact same ads at other Windows blogs and sites. And that rule was incorrectly added earlier to block even some content. Thankfully now resolved.

  1. @Sergey

    It appears to have been corrected now.

    I usually go directly to posts from my rss reader and never see the front page so I never experienced this issue.

    After reading this I went to the front page and it displays fine with ABP running with the 4 default filter lists enabled.

    I opened the ABP setting and saw that easylist had been automatically updated just minutes earlier.

  2. “I received several reports from readers that the front page is “broken” I had no choice but to inform my readers that the site is not broken.”
    While it’s good that you were made ware of this, I’m surprised that people don’t turn off their ad blockers as a 1st step of troubleshooting. Whenever I see any weird behaviour on any site, disabling my adblocker is the 1st thing I do.

  3. tweaker,
    I can not apply changes for the “window Borders”. When I set the “border with” to 3 and the “border padding”to 4 nothing happens. I have set the padding border to zero in the register-editor and also noting happens! Can you explain me what to do? In the past always has this function worked! Is it windows or tweakers?
    With kind regards dhr Willems

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