Anti-AdBlock Plugin

Thaya Kareeson, maker of the useful WP Greet Box Plugin, has just released Anti-AdBlock, a WordPress plugin that detects if the user is running the AdBlock Plus extension for Firefox and displays a message “humbly asking them to support your website by turning off their AdBlock software.”

The plugin allows you to customize the message to be displayed and the accompanying image. The box will, by default, log a cookie to prevent the box from showing again after the first visit, though you can set it to show more than once. Also, the message can be set to not display until a user has visiting more than X pages on the site, and it is set to a reasonably high number by default; a nice touch.

The message cannot be blocked very easily with AdBlock, as the most recent release incorporates a random ID for the message DIV to prevent people from simply adding “adblock_message” to their block list and stopping the plugin on a web-wide basis.

The plugin seems to be light-weight, and the message isn’t too bothersome. (Then again, I don’t run an AdBlock filter, I just selectively disable ads…)

I can think of another interesting way to use the plugin: Instead of just displaying a “humble message,” perhaps it would you could add a “Donate” button. My opinion is if someone’s going to block your ads, they should be compensating you for your work in some other way. Do you think it’s cheap to run sites such as Envato’s NETTUTS? Considering they pay out $150 to the writers of their tutorials, I would say it’s a huge disservice to them to block their ads.

I have mixed feeling about AdBlock, but I do think that the filter subscriptions that most users of the extensions install are overly sensitve. This plugin is a nice way to remind ad blockers that they are slowly undermining the internet by blanket-blocking ads.