slashdot

Slashdot is by far my favourite news collection and sharing platform where people were posting a lot of interesting news covering all sorts of areas, from tech to science, from politics to history, etc. I have been checking the daily feeds on Slashdot literatively on a daily base for quite a while and have been enjoying it, until recently I found the website is showing a lot of pop-up ads, which is pretty much annoying. Well, I believe it has the mechanism of delivering ads to readers for a long time but because I have been using ads blocker extension like AdblockPlus, I rarely see those annoying and distracting ads. However, just very recently, the AdblockPlus no longer works specifically for Slashdot even I subscribed the premium of AdblockPlus. Slashdot does provide its own subscription as well but I never got it working – anytime I visit its subscription page, the checkbox for subscription and the submit button would always be greyed out. Come on…I just need a way to block those ads and I really don’t want to give up Slashdot.

Fortunately, I came across a not-too-bad solution and I wil put it down in this blog post [1-3]. First, we still need AdblockPlus installed. Then, we need to install an extension called Tampermonkey extension. Next, we need to follow the instructions posted in Ref. [1] to install the tinyShield userscript. Here, I steal the detailed instructions and put it below,

  • Open settings of Tampermonkey.

  • Go to Utilities tab.

  • Input the following URL into Install from URL:

      https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@list-kr/tinyshield@latest/dist/tinyShield.user.js

  • Click Install button.

  • Confirm metadata of the userscript and click Install.

  • Return to a tab opening the website protected by AdblockPlus and reload the tab by pressing F5 or Ctrl + R or clicking the reload button.

With this, it seems all the ads on Slashdot can be blocked, giving us a fresh reading environment. Nice!


References

[1] https://github.com/List-KR/tinyShield

[2] https://forum.vivaldi.net/post/800134

[3] https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardFilters/issues/193633