Enable Web Content Filtering to block Advertising category
Not planned
I just read David Ulevitch's "No more ads" blog post at http://blog.opendns.com/2014/05/29/no-more-ads/ and the explanation at http://www.opendns.com/no-more-ads/. Kudos to OpenDNS!
As a fitting extension of this development, would you please enable customers to block the Advertising category via Web Content Filtering?
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Slowing down the experience is kind of a myth. Yes, routing to 127.0.0.1 and certain browsers have a time out, so yes those browsers will slow. But Opendns resolves to a working ip with a web server there. Even with those browsers it shouldn't be a problem. I don't think they're getting rid of redirections for blocked, phishing, etc. But I have tested a problem browser, routing to 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1 got rid of the delay.
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Actually, I want to block sites in the Advertising category in order to expedite and improve my network's web browsing experience. Ads (with images and video) generally consume a lot of network bandwidth and CPU resources on the client side. I'd rather get a basic "blocked" message from the OpenDNS servers.
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"in order to expedite and improve my network's web browsing experience."
This is not what would be the consequence, but to the contrary..
http://forums.opendns.com/comments.php?DiscussionID=7784
https://support.opendns.com/entries/40800604-Lengthy-HOSTS-file-or-black-hole-list
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You missed the point. It is merely not about the DNS lookups but about the HTTP/HTTPS traffic being produced. These block.X.id.opendns.com are webhop redirections which each must be accessed by HTTP/HTTPS (beside the DNS lookup to find out the IP addresses).
And who would want to cause DNS and HTTP/HTTPS traffic for something one doesn't want to see at all? This does not make sense. But saving all this traffic makes sense, only this. And yes, therefore e.g. the hosts file would be a viable option, but not DNS.
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Are you suggesting OpenDNS should not be in the business of Web Content Filtering because it generates extra web traffic? No, thankfully, they are squarely in the middle of that business. So they should let customers decide on which categories to filter. We already can filter on all categories except Advertising. Why? Well, historically, OpenDNS generated revenue by serving their own ads, and allowing customers to block them would result in a conflict of interest. But that has changed now, and so should categorical allowances for Web Content Filtering.
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"So they should let customers decide on which categories to filter."
And you will be the first coming to here to complain that your web became so slow, right?
"We already can filter on all categories except Advertising. Why?"
I can very well understand that they don't want to support such crap complaints by hiring some further staff to deal with this.
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The 2nd link that you referenced above makes a great case in support of my enhancement request (or idea). Thanks for the pointer.
The 1st link that you referenced above is ~4 years old. It enumerates a sequence of no longer applicable redirections. In fact, since OpenDNS eliminated their own ads within the past week, a blocked site (in my case) redirects to block.a.id.opendns.com and then to block.opendns.com. And without OpenDNS ads, not surprisingly, it's very fast.
I'm currently blocking most ad sites via the Always Block blacklist. It's beautiful. It's fast. I have no complaints. However, I'd rather block via the Advertising category, so I can leverage the dynamic Domain Tagging work of the helpful OpenDNS community.
Incidentally, if you insist on remaining steadfast in your opinion that the blocking mechanism in Web Content Filtering is too slow, I recommend you submit an enhancement request in the Idea Bank to improve the efficiency of the OpenDNS implementation.
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I always install ad-block browser extension on family computers to reduce the degree of mis-clicking and accidental software installation. At work I would like to have the choice to do the same for the 'bring your own device' user base we support.
This suggestion would give me control of something I want ot have control of. If you don't want to control that, don't check the box!
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Unfortunately we've found that blocking many of these advertising websites can have unintended affects on a users ability to surf the web and/or use many websites normally. As such we've taken the path of not allowing the category to be blocked but providing users information via statistics and reports and allowing them to take further action there. You can choose to add advertising domains to your blacklist to prevent them from loading on your network, just be aware that some websites may not work or render as intended if you do this.
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Would you please describe specifically any "unintended" effects that I might encounter? As I previously indicated, I am not experiencing any problems related to blocking ad sites.
Also, would you please elaborate on the OpenDNS rationale for differentiating the two methods of blocking ad sites? OpenDNS lets customers block them via the Always Block blacklist but not via the Advertising category. The outcome would be the same for either method, so why should OpenDNS allow the former and yet disable the latter?
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Generally speaking there are at least 2 different behaviors we have observed. The first is that that page(s) will not fully render with the actual content of the page either left unloaded or otherwise not visible. The second is that the blocked content will size incorrectly obscuring the content of the page. The problem with both of these is that there is no indication to you as the end user that it is being caused by blocking the advertising within the page, it just looks like the page is broken.
We are not stopping anyone from blocking advertising providers, and, as stated in our Terms of Service, we do not sell your data. If you would like to block Advertising providers on your network, then you can add the domains to your blacklist. Just be prepared that you may experience behaviors when browsing that are sub-optimal. If that happens, I would suggest removing any recent domains you've added to your blacklist and instead looking into solutions such as Ad Block Plus or other browser addons.
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