Ghostery started offering Click-to-Play (c2p) functionality a little while back for some of the most common elements. Its very useful and our users love it -- it simply and quickly answers the questions like where did my video or comments go. Click-to-Play is configurable through Ghostery options and may be disabled if the user wants. (http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023750)
Heres a how Click-to-Play works in Ghostery. We have several databases that are shipped with Ghostery, one of them is a click to play mapper that is associated to particular trackers in the database. If a user happens to block a tracker thats on the c2p map, Ghostery will take an extra step to examine the DOM of the page where it blocked the tracker to find the visible anchor where the element was supposed to sit and inserts its own Ghostery control to let the user know at the expected place that Ghostery took action. In some cases, we advise Ghostery to attach to the parent node because the element we anchor to may be hidden or invisible. The anchors are provided by our developers when c2p entries are created.
Troy runs his blog on Blogspot, and the integration Disqus has with Blogspot is non-standard. Because of this, Ghostery selector for c2p relied on specific Blogspot format and attached c2p warning at the parent. A recent change in Blogspot templates have created a condition in which Ghostery sometimes removes the content of the site, like in Troy's case. This is a bug that will be resolved in the next release.
To cover some other topics raised in comments:
- Incognito mode is a good defense, but its not foolproof. Blocking and running incognito mode is even better
- Disconnect is an alternative to Ghostery, but the reason you don't see this issue with them is that it does not offer click-to-play nor does it block Disqus
Ghostery started offering Click-to-Play (c2p) functionality a little while back for some of the most common elements. Its very useful and our users love it -- it simply and quickly answers the questions like where did my video or comments go. Click-to-Play is configurable through Ghostery options and may be disabled if the user wants. (http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016023750)
Heres a how Click-to-Play works in Ghostery. We have several databases that are shipped with Ghostery, one of them is a click to play mapper that is associated to particular trackers in the database. If a user happens to block a tracker thats on the c2p map, Ghostery will take an extra step to examine the DOM of the page where it blocked the tracker to find the visible anchor where the element was supposed to sit and inserts its own Ghostery control to let the user know at the expected place that Ghostery took action. In some cases, we advise Ghostery to attach to the parent node because the element we anchor to may be hidden or invisible. The anchors are provided by our developers when c2p entries are created.
Troy runs his blog on Blogspot, and the integration Disqus has with Blogspot is non-standard. Because of this, Ghostery selector for c2p relied on specific Blogspot format and attached c2p warning at the parent. A recent change in Blogspot templates have created a condition in which Ghostery sometimes removes the content of the site, like in Troy's case. This is a bug that will be resolved in the next release.
To cover some other topics raised in comments:
- Incognito mode is a good defense, but its not foolproof. Blocking and running incognito mode is even better
- Disconnect is an alternative to Ghostery, but the reason you don't see this issue with them is that it does not offer click-to-play nor does it block Disqus
- Ghostery, while not open-source, hosts its source for review here: https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/chrome/ or https://www.ghostery.com/ghosteries/safari/. Additionally, you may simply unzip the contents of any extension to see what it does and how it works