I stopped using this addon a long time ago when detection and support stopped.
I would have done the same. Moving forward, and with the advent of a better dev studio and tons of good resources, regular updates will be more common.
People who charge a fee do have an obligation to their customers.
Agreed.
I'm not worried by a tiny minority of people who use their own methods to bypass ad blocking.
This is the point I wanted to stress. I'm focused on the most common browsers using the most common extensions. Even then, things can change and detection can drop until an update. To your point above, I need to continue to support things and be transparent, which I'm going to do moving forward.
I'm only really interested in finding the majority of people who are blocking ads with adblock+ or whatever are the most common apps.
However, if the tech wizards share the method to bypass this addon on my forum and it's an easy process to implement then the addon would be pretty useless.
It's true, but if you have a large forum - a small amount of detection that leads to any increase is payments to you is still a net gain. I'm not trying to patronize here, but if you have wizard users, they're going to find ways to by-pass things and given I only sell a handful of copies of this software per year... it's difficult. With that said, the update frequency previously was unacceptable and shameful.
Almost all of the previous areas of attack to this extension have been removed. There's one more I'm working on, and until I've resolved it, I'm going to release updates that overcome it. I know how to resolve it, it's just taking a bit of finagling with XF because XF likes to declare calls within a namespace (this is the attack vector).
To quantify it, if the addon detects, say, 95%+ of ad blocking members and bypassing it is quite a hassle, and I felt it would continue to be supported, then I'd be happy to use it again. However, our commercial team have been in talks for a while with companies to provide a more generic adblocker recovery system.
95%+ would be fantastic. Unfortunately, getting real numbers is near impossible. Using the tools I have, and testing with uBl0ck and Block+ as an example, this is at 100% on a default install of those extensions. However, statistics lie, because the 100% doesn't include all the other possible extensions and browsers people could use.
Like mentioned above, I'm only focused on major/common browsers/extensions.
Once I can reliably add a new adblocker usergroup to members' accounts (and, of course, remove it quickly after they allow ads), then I can incentivise those people to allow ads for AVForums by denying them access to the additional features like competitions and classifieds (both of which are free to access, so I feel justified in requiring the viewing of ads to access them).
I get it, this was the exact purpose of the add-on in the first place.
Depending on userbase, the usage of adblockers varies greatly. I have a community that's primarily 40-50+ and adblock usage is 14%. I have another website that's more 20-40+, and the usage of adblock extensions is around 44%.
Hard to say for your forum, but I suspect you're in the 40%+ group.
As @bzcomputers writes, transparency is key and over promising and underdelivering is the best way to upset people.
I agree. I'm focused on doing better moving forward. It sucks that detection never goes up, only down. I've accepted this fact and can only do my best moving forward to stay on top of things.
i tried to access witha brave browser an nothing appeared.. even if im logging with a safari browser with the adblock addon..
Anakin is writing in the wrong discussion group, but I'll respond anyways given the detection is similar between both add-ons. While it's a bit more aggressive in the other add-on, things are the same in the fact that the most recent Brave browser is NOT detected. With companies like Google not detecting Brave, it leaves me thinking "what can I really do that they've not thought to do?".
With that said, Brave is LESS THAN 1% of the browser market, so who really cares.
For transparency: I'm not going to install every browser and extension. It's exhausting and way too time consuming. Chrome is 66%, Safari is 20%, Edge is 5%+. That's enough for me.
on my add-ons every time I post an update, the explanation is below.
forum.emuenzen.de
