At some point recently a change was made to EasyList, a service that provides a list of filter rules that help ad blocking software work effectively. The change filters out any elements with the ID of "ads". Unfortunately, due to a particularly nasty piece of web design in use by DKos, this change caused the site to appear as a blank page for anyone subscribed to EasyList. This countermeasure has been in use on Daily Kos for a long time, with the intent of rendering the site unusable for anyone who uses ad blocking software--but EasyList's mistake significantly widened the scope of the impact.
I've seen a couple diaries complaining about it, and there are several fixes recommended in them--some work, some don't, and some just band-aid the problem by excluding dailykos.com from Adblock Plus. I'm going to roll up here the two main solutions, explain what each one does, and hopefully help people understand a little more about what's going on.
For the HTML-disinclined, in the context of web design an "ID" is a kind of label that can be added to different pieces of a web site so that code or formatting can be tailored to affect only that part of the site. Since IDs are usually named something meaningfully related to the purpose of what they're labeling, one method used to block ads is to hide the contents of any element labeled with "ads" or some variation thereof, since these are almost always going to be an advertisement.
Web designers have tried all sorts of techniques in their losing war against Adblock users, all of which can be circumvented with the right filter or plugin. One of the ones used on Daily Kos is to label the <body> tag with the "ads" ID. The <body> tag is the element of a web page that contains all the visible content that's displayed to the user, and IDs have the same effect on it as on any other element--so if you hide all elements with the ID of "ads", you're also going to hide the <body>. This effectively means you're hiding the entire visible web page, resulting in a blank screen.
Frankly, this countermeasure is particularly idiotic--more than half of those browsing the web have adblock software, and new users coming to DKos for the first time aren't going to understand that this is part of the site's jihad against Adblock, they're just going to think the web site's broken and move on somewhere else. But that's neither here nor there; let's get this fixed.
If you've updated your EasyList subscription in the last few days, then the problem is already fixed for you--if by "fixed" you mean "reverted to the old behavior that didn't effectively block ads on DKos".
If you haven't, then the first thing you should do is update your EasyList subscription. You can do this in Firefox with Adblock Plus like so:
- Click on the red stop sign at the bottom of the window with the letters "ABP" in it to bring up Adblock Plus preferences.
- Click on the Filters menu and select Update all subscriptions.
This should disable the filter that was blocking the "ads" ID on Daily Kos, but that means you'll see ads on the site. If you're happy with that state of affairs, you don't need to read any further. If you'd like your ad blocking software to do the job it's intended to do without having to carve out exceptions for web sites that don't play nicely, read on.
In order to get around this, you'll need to add a custom filter. Open the Adblock Plus preferences again, and add the following filter:
###ads:not(body)
This will block all elements with the "ads" ID--unless it's the body tag. Credit goes to teedz in this thread for the idea of using not(tag), although I've made a slight modification to his rule to reflect the fact that it's an ID, not a Class, with which these tags are marked. If you don't know what that means, don't worry--just copy and paste the above rule into a new filter, and it should work exactly as is.
To get rid of the anti-adblock nag at the top of the DKos page, add another filter for #blockquote(adblocker). Read it the first time; I don't need to read it again.
Enjoy your ad-free web experience.