How to block the Admiral anti ad-block detection message
I don't mind seeing the occasional banner or text ad while browsing web sites. What I do mind is malvertising, auto-playing videos (despite steps taken by browsers to stop auto-play) and excessive ads that slow down my browser to the point where it affects the user experience. This is on a modern quad-core desktop PC with 16 GB of RAM. To that end, I gave in and installed uBlock Origin a few years ago. If ads and third-party tracking hadn't gotten so bad, I would not have had to resort to an ad-blocker.
These days, sites are fighting back. They're using ad-block detection scripts in order to request that you whitelist their site. In some cases, I am happy to do this. Recently, I've seen a new one with the logo "Powered by Admiral", which pops up a modal and asks you to whitelist. These are usually on sites that have a ton of auto-play videos and Taboola ads ("Doctors hate this one weird trick!"). I get it. Sites need ad revenue to fund their operations. I really would like to whitelist sites, but not if they're going to ruin the user experience.
You can block these by adding the domain serving the modal. For one such site, this was "prepareplanes.com". I'd imagine it could load from several different domains. It loads JavaScript code from a URL like the following:
Where you can see some references to the company behind the script:
You can blacklist the domain in your ad-blocker, or you can add an entry to your local hosts file, like such:
These days, sites are fighting back. They're using ad-block detection scripts in order to request that you whitelist their site. In some cases, I am happy to do this. Recently, I've seen a new one with the logo "Powered by Admiral", which pops up a modal and asks you to whitelist. These are usually on sites that have a ton of auto-play videos and Taboola ads ("Doctors hate this one weird trick!"). I get it. Sites need ad revenue to fund their operations. I really would like to whitelist sites, but not if they're going to ruin the user experience.
You can block these by adding the domain serving the modal. For one such site, this was "prepareplanes.com". I'd imagine it could load from several different domains. It loads JavaScript code from a URL like the following:
https://prepareplanes.com/v2you_npysBJkm-loh2Ln2VMQjIqYCCwKeoJnMTDjBMyXheBNWPurjR-4N3mf9pa217AsYxA/ModalEngage
Where you can see some references to the company behind the script:
var n={supportLink:"https://getadmiral.typeform.com/to/GKzIOG",supportEnabled:true,attributionLink:"https://getadmiral.com/pb/",defaultInstructionsURL:"https://my.getadmiral.com/instructions",defaultStickyBubbleURL:"https://my.getadmiral.com/sticky-bubble",defaultStickyMenuURL:"https://my.getadmiral.com/sticky-menu",defaultWhitelistURL:"https://my.getadmiral.com/filterlist"
...
You can blacklist the domain in your ad-blocker, or you can add an entry to your local hosts file, like such:
127.0.0.1 prepareplanes.com
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