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fravia's
antiadvert
labs
Removing
Banners

Fravia's Nofrill
Web design
(since 1995!)

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[Essays]


Updated
January 2006
How to remove those ugly and vulgar advertisement banners
There are more than THREE HUNDRED MILLIARDS sites out there, doubling every EIGHT months... and many among them do carry absolutely useless banners and ads that sore our eyes. Of course most readers of this site are using [proxies] and good browsers, like [Opera] or Firefox, able to nuke all crap-images "on the fly". Thus our savvy readers can access quickly enough the contents they are searching for... rari nantes in gurgite vasto.
[Essays]

The "remove banners" part of my site is aimed to teach (and develop) many clever methods that we will use to get rid of all sort of advertisement crap we may encounter.
As you'll see there are many possible options: almost all of them involve either some filtering or some html (or javascript or CGI or PHP) tricks.

Remove 
banners! 
remobann.gif
 Kill
 the Frill!
Most recent addition
http://bfilter.sourceforge.net/
BFilter is a filtering web proxy. It was originally intended for removing banner ads only, but since then its capabilities have been greatly extended. Unlike most of the similar tools, it doesn't rely on blacklists (although it does support them). The problem with blacklists is that advertisers are always one step ahead. You see an ad slip through, you update your blacklist, and in case it didn't help, you add a new entry yourself. Once its Author got tired of that, he decided to write a proxy that would detect ads heuristically, much like modern anti-virus software manages to detect many viruses unknown to it.

BFilter is Free software released under the GNU General Public License.
You'll find here various contributions and/or essays:
[+Greythorne] ~ [rocksteady] ~ [Fluril] ~ [Eternal Bliss]
[Gordon & ALH84001] ~ [Jeff's special "removing banners" page]

Our own essays
The advertisers clowns and lackeys argue that "Netizens enter into an implicit agreement with Web companies to accept their ads in exchange for free information", similar to television viewers forced to slurp commercials in exchange for free programming. But there are no explicit agreements, and many users want to rid their surfing experiences of large banner ads that can take minutes to load, so, let's proceed, despite what whomever may argue :-)

First of all we should -IMO- find the EARLY copies of some interesting software solutions: as you'll see below, most of them have been -alas- subsequently censured or volontarly crippled :-(
James Howard, created Internet Fast Forward, one of the first programs designed to filter out banner ads.

The software he produced was discontinued due to liability problems after he sold his company, PrivNet, to Pretty Good Privacy in November 1996. Howard said Internet companies had threatened to sue, accusing his company of violating their copyrights and modifying their pages. Howard had countered that users were the ones who controlled the content, not the software producers.

PGP decided the risk of lawsuits was too great and stopped production of the ad filtering program.

Solid Oak, the Internet filtering company that produces the Web filtering software Cybersitter, introduced tools to screen out banner ads.

Brian Milburn, president of Solid Oak, said he introduced the filtering technology in response to requests from some of Cybersitter's 1.2 million customers, many of whom use older computers with slow Internet connections that make viewing banner ads a time-intensive task.

One day later the company rescinded the tool that screens out ads in free email services, because users sign contracts saying they will accept ads in exchange for free email, Milburn said.

And now let's begin with some interesting approaches... :-)

+Greythorne wrote (long ago) a bautiful javascript banner killer, that you'll find here. Here is what Wizard +Greythorne writes about it: "Note: this proggy uses popup windows to capture popup windows (kind of like fighting fire with fire) if your browser doesnt display popup windows, then why are you trying to run this? you are ALREADY immune to the silly banner popups!

This one is pre-programmed to kill the prohosting.com banners, the tripod.com banners, and the geocities.com banners."

you sure know about the listen.to; come.to; fly.to; etc. redirection service.

if you'd like to use it, you have to include a little javascript-code on your page. 'they' say a bot will have a look on your page every 2 weeks to check if the script is installed. if not the redirector stops.

workaround::

this script is between two html-comment tags like the following:
<!-- V3 Redirect Services Banner start -->
code...
<!-- V3 Redirect Services Banner end -->

on this way the banner can be seen and the bot is satisfied cause the code is there.

but

if you change only one little thing, if you let the first comment open:
<!-- V3 Redirect Services Banner start --
code.. ^^^
<!-- V3 Redirect Services Banner end -->

the code is cloaked, can't be seen, and the bot's satisfied.
(worked for some months till today)

happy days

rocksteady


On many free host, you have a banner added automaticaly on index.html.
If your user has JavaScript enabled, here his a trick, insert 


<script language="Javascript">

<!--

location.href="main.htm"

//-->

</script>


between header and body.
It will be read before everything and the user even 
doesn't see (s)he has changed of page. 

Fluril 

Hi, I somehow managed to remove the popups for virtual 
avenue by adding this codes before the
<html> of every page.

//to avoid Javascript error notice
<script>
function NoError() {
return(true);
} 
onerror=NoError; 
</script>

//to prevent the pop-up
<script> 
va_rvjr137y=window.open; 
function OpenNullWin() {
this.window;
} 
function FakeOpen(url,nam,atr) {
return(new OpenNullWin());
} 
window.open=FakeOpen;
</script>


Looking at the codes added by the server, va_rvjr137y 
seems to be the "window handle". By modifying the codes 
produced by Proxomitron, I was able to add this codes in 
to counter the popups. Just tested without the codes, the 
popup is seen. When I add in the codes, the pop-up disappeared.


For Xoom website, they will automatically add in an extra frame. To counter 
that, add in _XOOM into your links eg
http://members.xoom.com/Ryanosis/files.html
into
http://members.xoom.com/_XOOM/Ryanosis/files.html

But in this case, you will need a website director.

Another way is to add the codes
<script language="JavaScript">

<!--
if (top.location.href != location.href)
top.location.href = location.href;
// -->

</script>

Regards


Eternal Bliss

On services that stick their banner code at the very end of your page, the simplest way to eliminate the popups is to stick a "NOEMBED" tag after your closing "/HTML". This works fine for me in Opera 3.60 and all versions of Netscape and MSIE tested. I figure why use javascript against itself when you can use html against javascript and be more compatible (or is it incompatible?) with more banners.

Gordon
On remobann.htm, Gordon mentioned using a <noembed> tag after the </html> tag for hosts that put their disease (code) at the end of your pages. Though, he said this was supported by all browsers he tested, I found that it did not work in NS Communicator 4.72 (multiple tests). Of course, it may have only been a glitch. I decided to try adding a <noscript> tag after the prescribed <noembed> (since they 'so cleverly' add closing tags in front of their precious crap code in the event you leave a <script> or <noscript> tag open --accidentally, of course :] ) and it did the trick in Opera 4.02, NS Communicator 4.72, and M$IE 5.0. Oh, yeah... this was on a Geocities account... foolish me! Best wishes to you and the new searching fortress!
Respectfully,

ALH84001, September 2000
Jeff's special page for removing banners
June 1999
It's an 'ongoing' project that you will find on this special page
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