intrusive audio ads
If you’ve been active on tumblr lately, you may notice that they’ve started running a new type of ad in the right-hand sidebar unit. Specifically, there’s been an uptick in ads that auto-play loud audio, some of which are even un-mutable.
We’ve addressed this in Anti-Capitalism version 1.3.0, which adds a new option:
(small mea culpa: the naming here is slightly confusing. this will *always* remove the sidebar ad, even if it doesn’t happen to be one that plays audio, because we don’t have the ability to distinguish between them. the other difference is that it does it in a way that also takes care of the audio-visual component instead of just hiding the ad, like some adblockers have been doing)
(EDIT: yes, you’ll have to refresh the page after installing the extension/enabling the option. It sounds like this might also conflict with other ad-blockers, so let us know if you have any issues and/or try disabling other adblockers first and see if that fixes the problem)
let us know what you think! I’m probably going to be going to bed soon, but you can always reach us in our ask box, our support blog, or our live support chat. In general the dev team has less time to reply to asks nowadays because of both real-life obligations and the sheer quantity of asks we receive, so you’ll generally have a better time with the support chat, if you can catch one of us online. If nobody is online, you always can leave a message for us to read later. thanks for understanding!
(one last plug—If you’re interested in helping us run New XKit, for example by answering asks or helping other users with questions + problems, come stop by and introduce yourself! we don’t bite, we promise!)
Just pushed an update to this that will now catch more ad types that were reported to us by the community. Thanks everyone! Make sure you update to Anti-Capitalism 1.3.1. You can do this by going to XKit > Other > Update All Extensions.
We also pushed an update to Vanilla Video that basically disables the extension—it was causing some severe problems with tumblr’s new “autoplay” code and basically causing non-ads to autoplay and then become invisible. fun. Anyway, if you have vanilla video installed, please make sure you’re on version 0.0.3.
As always, make sure to refresh your page (and any other tumblr tabs you might have open) after updating or installing XKit extensions. If you’re still running into issues, you might also want to try restarting your browser.