Ad Blocking and the TOS

When advertising was first introduced, ad blocking or the providing of ad blocking was prohibited by the ToS.

Asking for clarification about what ad blocking consisted of ended up with this response from kevink :

I'm the guy who talked to the lawyers who wrote or modified the ToS, so I'll try to answer your question(s).

How does it apply?

I don't want to sound flip, but you're probably reading it correctly. If you're breaking the ads' display, you're breaking the rules. How do we enforce those rules? Pretty hard to do. Honor code...?

Why's it in there?

Two reasons: first, because breaking the ads hurts our ability to make the money that makes business work. No doubt about it. We need to make money here and blocking ads messes with that. The other reason is that ad blockers will mess up more than just the ads. They often break the display of other parts of the interface. People complain to support that such-and-such doesn't work, and bleh. Not that we want to say, "Told you so..." but we do want to be able to say, "You're not supposed to block ads. Please don't."

However, after a sensationalist Slashdot post, bradfitz retracted the offending clause in a post to lj_support :

ToS Change --- whoops

Regarding the ToS change to ban ad blocking software:

Totally our bad.

We didn't catch that the ad-blocker restriction made it into the final ToS changes. From what I can make of the series of events which led to its inclusion was that we basically passed off our ToS to some lawyers and said, "Update it for advertising". They then mimiced some other sites' advertising policies (which said no ad blockers), and then all the right people who were supposed to review it didn't and it made it live onto the site.

So this is a pre-announcement that a more user-friendly ToS change is on its way.

(After all, we can't even detect that you're even using ad blockers to begin with, so there's no point in us saying you can't. Plus you might not even have control over what's installed on your computer, etc.)

So, yeah, sorry: we messed up.

The TOS change made it possible for no_lj_ads to start producing yummy ad blocking scripts and guides, so we're grateful it happened, although confused at how it mananged to "slip" through.