Advertisement can, but must not, be annoying

Details: Created on Monday, 23 November 2009 23:27

Many Sites use advertisement to get some revenue for the service they provide.

So far this is not bad at all.

If I like the site and the advertising is not to intrusive I tend to click here and there on a banner/link to support the site.

But many sites have those annoying blinking, flickering, shouting, music playing, and and and Ads I can't stand.

Thought I am using Opera, there is noting like "Adblock Plus" for Firefox. Okay, Opera has a build in Ad filter, but manually adding every banner is a lifetime job.

Thankfully there are two Sites (I know) which collect hostnames/IPs of servers known to host banner and other advertising stuff.

One system-wide solution would be, to add those servers to the hostfile and redirect the DNS request.

This can easily done (at least on Linux) with a ready to use script on http://hostsfile.mine.nu/.

Another approach I describe here here, is to use the urlfilter.ini file in Opera.

Just download a recent list in Opera "urlfilter.ini" format from http://hostsfile.mine.nu/ and replace the existing one in your Opera directory.

To automate this and stay up to date I hacked this little python script together.

It will fetch the list, merge it with existing entries in the urlfilter.ini file and save the new list. You can enter patterns which should be removed from the list.

Just run the script (via cron) weekly and surfing the web is fun again.

From time to time you should check the file cause currently my script only merges in new lines, but does not remove hosts which have been removed from the adserver list.
(It might do in the next version)

Get it here:
opera_blocklist.py