[Please read] I know I posted about this before, but.

[Scream And Fly]

I've posted about this before, but I thought to post it one more time, and I hope you all don't mind but this is very important. Most internet browsers these days are made with ad-blockers and they're enabled by default. The problem for S&F is that these ad-blockers prevent our Google ads from displaying, and that denies S&F revenue from those ads, which is very important to help offset this site's extremely expensive data and maintenance costs. All ad-blockers have a feature that lets you whitelist any site, and that's what I am asking of you all - to whitelist S&F so our Google ads are displayed. The site absolutely depends on that revenue.

I will not create any mandates that require users to disable their ad-blockers to use this site. Many large sites have implemented that as a solution, and I do not feel it is appropriate here. If you do not want to whitelist S&F, it would be very helpful to consider becoming a Team Member.

Alright, with that said, I will not make another post about this. I appreciate the contributions that you all made to S&F, which is what built this site to what it is today. I am enormously grateful to you all. To our Team Members, Supporting Members, and Supporting Vendors, I am very grateful for your support. Thank you so much.

Thank you for reading everybody,
Greg

[rock]

How do we white list? I know boats...not computers.

Rock

[LakeFever]

I’m in a similar position I can’t figure out this stuff. Does it help if we stop visiting? Meaning if someone visits with Adblock is that worse than not visiting at all? I’m trying to understand if traffic is punished by Adblock users or just not paid because certain users have Adblock?

[VkingMike]

This is for Google Chrome

Allow ads on specific sites

You can allow any site you visit to show any ad to you.

1. On your computer, open Chrome.
2. Go to a page you trust that has blocked ads.
3. To the left of the web address, select View site information Site settings.
4. Under “Permissions,” next to “Intrusive ads,” select Allow.
5. Reload the web page.

[VkingMike]

For Microsoft Edge

1. Open Edge Settings: Click on the "Settings and more" icon (three dots) in the upper-right corner of the browser and select "Settings".
2. Go to Cookies and Site Permissions: In the settings, click on "Cookies and site permissions".
3. Access Pop-ups and Redirects: Under "All permissions," click on "Pop-ups and redirects".
4. Add Allow Exceptions:
   
   • In the "Allow" section, click "Add".
   • Enter the specific URL of the website you want to allow intrusive ads for, starting with "https://".
   • Click "Add" again to save the exception

[DangerNewb]

If you're running AdBlockPlus, you should have a small ABP icon on upper right corner of your screen. You can click that and use the slider to turn it off when on this site.

[David - WI]

I would much rather pay yearly than let Google track everything I do with their invasive ads.

[DangerNewb]

I would much rather pay yearly than let Google track everything I do with their invasive ads.

They're tracking you whether you see ads or not.

[David - WI]

They're tracking you whether you see ads or not.

Are you sure?

The DuckDuckGo browser stops a lot of the tracking stuff automatically (https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-he...search-privacy).

DuckDuckGo Search offers the key features you expect from a search engine, but unlike other search engines, it never tracks you. And because the connection between you and DuckDuckGo Search is encrypted, that means your internet provider can’t see the searches you make on DuckDuckGo either.

I've also been running "pihole" on my home network for a couple years:



I allow all the ads from the supporting vendors here; but the other ads never even load:



Also, Proton VPN on my phone blocks a lot when I'm away from home (it works on my home network but I already have pihole running).

Proton VPN has dedicated DNS servers that are active on each Proton VPN server you connect to and is responsible for resolving all the domain requests for every resource (image, scripts, ads, etc.) for every website you visit and app you use. When you are connected to Proton VPN, your DNS requests are encrypted to prevent DNS leaks from exposing your browsing history.

When you enable NetShield Ad-blocker, the DNS server will check these domains against databases of domains known to host malware, ads, or trackers. If any of the domains match, our DNS server will automatically block that resource from loading, keeping your device clean and speeding up your browsing.

I ditched Google/Samsung and installed GrapheneOS on my phone: https://grapheneos.org/features

GrapheneOS is a private and secure mobile operating system with great functionality and usability. It starts from the strong baseline of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and takes great care to avoid increasing attack surface or hurting the strong security model. GrapheneOS makes substantial improvements to both privacy and security through many carefully designed features built to function against real adversaries. The project cares a lot about usability and app compatibility so those are taken into account for all of our features.

It's not a perfect system, but it seems to stop all of the "targeted" advertising.

[Li'l Toy]

Thanks VKing Mike! You made this easy for this troglodite.

[David - WI]

158 tracking attempts per day from S&F seems a little bit excessive:

I think some of them are built into the forum software, some boards with no outside advertising still have cookie/trackers for Amazon & others.