I have removed the ad box powered by Project Wonderful.
Part 5 of the Running to Stand Still series.
Project Wonderful
This is because Project Wonderful is shutting down this summer. This is a great pity, because it was one of the few attempts at an ethical advertising model online. From their post:
When we started working on Project Wonderful in early 2006, it was with the hope that online advertising could be something good, something that you'd want to see. We were always the odd company out: we didn't track readers, we didn't sell out our publishers, and we never had issues with popups, popunders, or other bad ads the plague the internet - because our technology simply wasn't built to allow for that.
Advertising companies are engaged in a destructive arms race over who can do the most intrusive tracking of people’s habits and most intensly violate their privacy. There is no niche for an ethical advertiser.
Technically
As well as removing the JavaScript I had to adjust the layout of the page to no longer accomodate a blank ad box.
This change is going to be delayed by a day because I use a 1-day cache header on my static files. So I have taken the plunge and activated ManifestStaticFilesStorage. This does the thing where static files gain an extra hash in their name which varies by content, so I can give them long expiry times because if they change their names will change.
ManifestStaticFilesStorage is always a pain to set up because there will inevitably be some nuance of dpeloying to production that differes from your staging site no matter how many billions and billions of hours are spent creating staging servers and your production site will therefore experience a stressful period of brokenness wile you diagnise it. In this case I discovered
-
When the
collectstaticpost-processing hook creates the munged version of a file whose name contains badly encoded Unicode charaters this succeeds on my macOS development system but fails on my Ubuntu production system; and -
As of five minutes ago version of the Less compiler the deployment script installs does not write any output when you use the
-Mflag but the deployment script does not know it failed so reports OK, so after all the trouble you did to make it serve the stylesheet with a extra hash in the name to prevent it accidentally using a cached file it is still serving the old version of the stylesheet anyway. -
You need to arrange to restart the server so it rereads the manifest, otherwise it carries on serving the old files.
The last is totes awks because I just made it so that restarting the server is
ouside the powers of the alleged user account. I have to remember to do that
step manually using my admin account.
Lessons
There is no niche for an ethical advertiser.
Social media sites, funded by advertising, must optimize their experience to keep people wasting time on their site rather than someone else’s. We complain about the changes to the timeline algorithm, but after we have complained we have nowhere else to go so we carry on scrolling. I dread to think what they are currently cooking up for the next iteration.
The GDPR is an attempt to stem this degeneration but it is probably too late. Alerting people to privacy violations is all very well and good but if there is no alternative site to switch to with a better policy, then all that happens is we feel cross and helpless. We have no choice but to consent to being tracked if we want to carry on as usual—which puts us in a worse position than before.