Etsy, Adblock, and My Hack

Maybe I wasn't crazy. A long while ago I tried to put the Etsy Mini widget on my LiveJournal. It didn't display or anything when I posted the code to the journal live. I thought maybe LJ was stripping out the scripts, as they are sometimes apt to do. Well, I went to put an Etsy Mini on my new blog yesterday and lo & behold, it didn't work. Something was up. The game was afoot. And, I am not crazy because I looked at it in Safari, and it worked fine. What. The. Heck.

Well, guess what. Adblock has added all of the Etsy domain to their list of "block me". Talk about irritating! I was furious when I found this out. I'm not adding an advertisement section to my blog, I'm adding a small widget that displays MY SHOP with MY WORK in it! I will not stand for this. So, what did I do? I wrote an email to Adblock asking them to consider putting Etsy on their non-intrusive ads list.

The non-intrusive ads list is this new thing Adblock is pushing. I like their reasoning. Whitelist ads or whatever for specific websites that aren't intrusive (read: NOT FLASH). I can get down with that, especially if it means they won't block MY shop widget anymore! Well, Adblock got back to me last night/this morning. Their response? We agree! But we can't just all willy-nilly whitelist Etsy. We need an agreement with Etsy to do that.

Awesome. I, along with millions of other blogging Etsy sellers, am now at the mercy of Etsy and Adblock to negotiate a treaty so we're no longer punished for sharing our own store on our blogs. There MUST be something else I could do to get around this Adblock bull. I mean, sure, I can turn off the Etsy filter on my Adblock, but what about my visitors? They won't see it! They'll just see "Shop Cozy Rhody" and a blank space. DO. NOT. WANT.

Well, I found a hacky workaround that solves my problem. For now. Hopefully, some of you Etsians out there will find yourselves on my blog reading about this workaround. I hope it will solve the issue for every Etsian. But, we'll see. At some point, people have to take the initiative themselves. Here's what I did:

1. Open the Etsy Mini javascript. It's the web address inside the quotes after scr= in the first <script...> element. Or, you could go to one of the links below.
   
   • If you're displaying items from your shop, open the javascript here.
   • If you're displaying items from your favorites, open the javascript here.
2. Copy EVERYTHING you see.
3. Paste what you copied in the Etsy Mini code inside the first set of script tags: <script ... > PASTE HERE </script>...
   
4. Delete the src='...' property from the first <script...> tag: <script type='text/javascript'>
   
5. Save your widget or webpage or whatever.
6. Turn adblock back on, turn the etsy filter back on, and verify that you can see your widget.

The end result should be that you see your Etsy Mini on your blog/website/whatever with Adblock turned on without any modifications to the filters & restrictions. In the mean time, if people would PLEASE submit and email or something to Etsy to get them to work out an agreement with Adblock so Adblock will whitelist Etsy so these scripts will work as designed out-of-the-box without any hacking to be had on the end of the shop owner, that would be fabulous. Contact Etsy Here.

Lastly, I leave you with the email response I got from Adblock. With any luck, this will be resolved sometime this year and people won't need to muck about with either their javascript or Adblock preferences to get desired results.

Thanks for contacting us. I agree that blogs like yours are the exactly the kind of websites we want to support with the Acceptable Ads initiative. However, we can't just whitelist some ads without having an agreement with the network in place (see this thread: https://adblockplus.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=9280#p57027). The reason for this is that if Etsy was to change its ad format, our users would be exposed to ads that aren't compliant with our criteria and blame us for that.

If you want the whitelisting to happen, you could contact Etsy about this issue. If they enter an agreement with us not to change the ad format in a way that would not comply with our criteria, we can make a proposal in the community to add them to the exceptions list.

K.Thx.Bye.