How to stop ads from spamming you or eating your data?


Some websites say that advertisers are necessary in order to keep themselves up and running, that may be true but there’s no reason that websites need to have an excessive amount of advertisements especially those with the videos that automatically start playing weather they have sound or not, they consume a lot of data.

I personally would not mind websites having advertisements if they show a reasonable amount of advertisements, but not an excessive amount of ads and they do not have any videos automatically start playing.

Ad Blocker Plus (APB)

Chances are you already have FireFox installed already on your computer, if so you can install an add on called Ad Blocker Plus it’s free to install and it only takes seconds.

Pros

  • Free and easy to install
  • Blocks almost all advertisements
  • Allows you to whitelist websites you want support by allowing advertisements
  • Allows you to allow advertisements that are considered to be acceptable

Cons

  • Some websites such as Forbes, Daily Mail block users who have ad blocker enabled unless you whitelist their domain names.
  • Sometimes the ad blocker does not work if the list is not updated
  • Sometimes the ad blocker does not work as websites find a way to bypass the ABP unless ABP issues an update.

Brave (web browser)

Brave is a web browser that can be installed on Apple computer and Windows computers, and iPads, iPhones for Apple.

Pros

Cons

  • If you are on an iPad for example and you use brave, it appears to change the side slightly.

Your computer has an ad blocker that you probably didn’t even know existed

If your computer is running Windows 10, first in the search box at the task bar enter notepad and run it as an administrator > press Yes > then press Ctrl + O > enter this in the textbox C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc and then chose all files and then look for a file called hosts.

You will see a file that looks like this, where is says “blocked.tld” replace that with a website you want to block. After you have entered the domain name i.e. blocked.tld press Ctrl + S to save and then the site will be blocked.

If the site is not blocked you may need to clear cookies, history, cache, and DNS cache for the changes to take effect.

You can also see this website for a list of domain names that are ad websites that you can copy and paste https://helpdeskgeek.com/how-to/block-websites-using-hosts-file (scroll all the way down the page until you see “What Else Can I Do With The Hosts File?” and you should see a link, this is a text file of various malware and tracking ad sites.

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.

#

# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.

#

# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each

# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should

# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.

# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one

# space.

#

# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual

# lines or following the machine name denoted by a ‘#’ symbol.

#

# For example:

#

#      102.54.94.97     rhino.acme.com          # source server

#       38.25.63.10     x.acme.com              # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.

#            127.0.0.1       localhost

#            ::1             localhost

#            127.0.0.1       blocked.tld

Pros:

  • Blocking ads this way you won’t get an error saying that you need to disable your ad-blocker when accessing sites like Forbes, Daily Mail and they won’t block you from accessing their sites.

Cons

  • This will not block video ad on YouTube
  • You must follow the steps above in the order to add-remove websites
  • You may need to clear cookies, history, cache, and DNS cache for the changes to take effect.

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