Revert NEW Homepage Design To Something Useable

[adrynalyne]

On 01/10/2025 at 09:43, Steven P. said:

One does not to have a PHD or be a scientist to summarize "Largest black hole ever discovered and it's bigger than you may have imagined" the article went hot and got us a lot of views.

I think it's weird that you can't just decide to skip them if they bother you so much. 

I'm a co-owner of the site, and believe it or not I do not read every news article and every forum post, especially the ones that do not interest me.

Did you notice that’s one I didn’t comment on? It’s the crap ones I do.  Apparently me pointing out that it’s crap earned me a warning for being “detrimental” to the site.

 

I tried to discuss this with you privately but since you can’t be bothered to respond, let’s let everyone hear it. 
 

 

[adrynalyne]

On 01/10/2025 at 09:45, hellowalkman said:

or maybe consider that the writer may be busy  

You were too busy to defend your article about what law of the universe was broken? You sure did reply a lot with incorrect responses for being so busy and despite me reporting the article, several times (as I was instructed), you “sort of” changed the title when someone ELSE mentioned it. Don’t deny it, you quoted them and confirmed the title change. 
 

https://www.neowin.net/amp/super-heating-gold-unexpectedly-breaks-a-fundamental-law-of-universe/

Edited October 1, 2025 by adrynalyne

[+Edouard Subscriber²]

On 02/10/2025 at 02:34, Steven P. said:

I wonder how he (and others) feel about all the sites that do not disclose they were written with AI assistance? (and there are tons of them out there with garbage articles that make little to no sense because they aren't even edited)

Ours are AI assisted, and checked by an Editor. We do not have a machine that spits out articles and self publishes them.

---

[Steven P. Administrators]

Replied to adrynalyne's PM that I was not alerted to (so I didn't intentionally ignore it). I'm quite done on this subject now if you don't mind.

[hellowalkman Reporter]

On 01/10/2025 at 22:19, adrynalyne said:

reply a lot with incorrect responses

tell me how any of those responses were "incorrect"

[adrynalyne]

On 01/10/2025 at 10:00, hellowalkman said:

tell me how any of those responses were "incorrect"

I will PM you. 

[cork1958]

Just to get back on topic, site is still screwing up in my Edge. 😁

Edit: Now screwing up in my Firefox. First time for that.

[Steven P. Administrators]

On 01/10/2025 at 19:05, cork1958 said:

Just to get back on topic, site is still screwing up in my Edge. 😁

Edit: Now screwing up in my Firefox. First time for that.

I can't remember if you said you used adblock or VPN.

Thing is we implemented Cloudflare in August (which does not play nice with some VPNs) and today we have enabled an "AdShield" via our advertiser (they requested it) so it is two things we have protecting the site. If you can rule out that these are not why it is happening you will need to provide more info other than "site is still screwing up in my Edge."

[Louisifer]

Edge is normal for me

[JayZJay]

I'm having problems with article pages and I do not want to turn off Brave's blocking of ads and tracking. (I still get ads anyway.)

I also did not like the main page being broken up with all of the various sections. I'm glad it looks like that has been reverted back.

[cork1958]

On 01/10/2025 at 13:12, Steven P. said:

I can't remember if you said you used adblock or VPN.

Thing is we implemented Cloudflare in August (which does not play nice with some VPNs) and today we have enabled an "AdShield" via our advertiser (they requested it) so it is two things we have protecting the site. If you can rule out that these are not why it is happening you will need to provide more info other than "site is still screwing up in my Edge."

I use Ublock Origin (Neowin Whitelisted) and Nordvpn, which was disabled when just here in Firefox.

FWIW, currently here using Opera with Ublock Origin and unfortunately Neowin is not whitelisted as I do see even more ads with it whitelisted than I do with other browsers. Don't normally come here using Opera though just for that reason. Haven't seen the current issue with Opera so far in about 10 minutes of browsing here.

Edit: Trying Edge now and have removed Neowin from being whitelisted. Site working great on Neowin with Edge!

P.S. will not leave Edge set that way though.

Edit 2: Just got pop up in Edge even after removing it from whitelist, so that didn't matter. Putting Neowin back as whitelisted now.

Edited October 1, 2025 by cork1958

[eiffel_g]

On 01/10/2025 at 18:48, Steven P. said:

I still find it shameful that certain members gloat about ad blocking while it's clear they also rely heavily on our services, insofar that they demand absolutely no interruptions/site breakage/hosting issues/etc to it!

Ok, I'm home now, different ISP, IP,PC...

At home I use ad blocker - UBlock Origin. Same issue - but it seems you did something - no more error page if I press ok, but a warning about ad blockers.

I did some tests, and it seems the only solution is to disable or remove completely UBlock Origin. I've tried to put neowin as exception, but it doesn't work. Also, with it disabled completely I still got the error 2 times in one hour of tests. 

For work, I don't know.  Perhaps there are some company or ISP blocks/filters that I don't know about. I don't have control over the internet server. But I do see ads on some local news websites I visit.

However I guess you still need some tweaking. Disabling/Enabling each time I visit Neowin is not a long term solution for me. Allowing to use exception rules would be better, but it seems your script check for the ad blocker presence, not if it's active or not.

Also it's quite interesting that this "script" that detect ad blockers started to work exactly after you restored the site. Didn't had any issue before.

Edited October 1, 2025 by eiffel_g

[+Warwagon MVC]

Damn, who ####'ed in adrynalyne's cheerios? 

[corrosive23]

4 different browsers, screwed in all of them. The only thing that fixes it, is disabling Ad-Guard. Even whitelisting the site doesn't fix it, I have to disable it entirely. Forums work fine, its just the frontpage.

[tsupersonic]

On 01/10/2025 at 12:30, hellowalkman said:

I agree with Steve, this month we published just 14 AI-generated science stories, which is just ~0.02% of all the articles we published (not counting the software stories in this number). 

It really seems like you @adrynalyne is quite biased against them if you feel such a small percentage of articles is making your Neowin experience bad.  

14 AI generated articles, 1-2 "original articles/news", remaining articles are rehashes of the same thing over and over

[adrynalyne]

On 01/10/2025 at 10:37, Warwagon said:

Damn, who ####'ed in adrynalyne's cheerios? 

AI. 

[FloatingFatMan]

On 01/10/2025 at 18:26, eiffel_g said:

However I guess you still need some tweaking. Disabling/Enabling each time I visit Neowin is not a long term solution for me. Allowing to use exception rules would be better, but it seems your script check for the ad blocker presence, not if it's active or not.

Yeah, personally I consider this a major problem.  It's perfectly reasonable to ask people to whitelist the site, but it's absolutely NOT reasonable to expect them to completely disable their adblock software, leaving them vulnerable to less well behaved sites. I don't know about you guys, but I tend to have quite a lot of tabs open at a time...

This needs to be looked at IMO.  

[wingliston]

On 01/10/2025 at 16:10, FloatingFatMan said:

Yeah, personally I consider this a major problem.  It's perfectly reasonable to ask people to whitelist the site, but it's absolutely NOT reasonable to expect them to completely disable their adblock software, leaving them vulnerable to less well behaved sites. I don't know about you guys, but I tend to have quite a lot of tabs open at a time...

This needs to be looked at IMO.  

This can be resolved by adding your own filter for 'html-load.com'. I probably shouldn't post the filter rule I added. It might be against the rules. 🤫

[+Legendary Subscriber²]

On 01/10/2025 at 17:37, adrynalyne said:

No, you are using AI to summarize what you don’t understand, leading to more confusion from readers because half the time it makes even less sense and when the writer is questioned, they cannot answer the questions because they don’t know either.

Take the disclosure off, it makes no difference. AI generated articles are easy to spot. 

I just let AI summerise AI generated aricles that go into too much detail about something I dont know enough about to understand.

[TheReaperMan]

 

So on every page I now get this popup, and can not do anything on the page until I click ok, if I click cancel it keeps re appearing(edge)

it then take me to this page

So your "Adshield" is preventing access, due to my enabled adblocker, neowin is whitelisted and that should be sufficient, I need adblocker for other sites due to dodgy popups and I will never disable it. 

 

[TheReaperMan]

To add it looks to now not be happening, so maybe you reverted a change?

[Steven P. Administrators]

On 02/10/2025 at 14:24, TheReaperMan said:

To add it looks to now not be happening, so maybe you reverted a change?

Yeah it should be fixed..  it was another script clashing with it. But that issue also needs to be fixed.

Apologies on my part for assuming people weren't whitelisting. But I want to add that for those people who received the script error in the popup I was adamant and always believed that it was a script error and I kept pressing my contact about it. I received confirmation and a "fix" half an hour ago and I implemented it shortly after.

[FloatingFatMan]

On 02/10/2025 at 14:07, Steven P. said:

Yeah it should be fixed..  it was another script clashing with it. But that issue also needs to be fixed.

Apologies on my part for assuming people weren't whitelisting. But I want to add that for those people who received the script error in the popup I was adamant and always believed that it was a script error and I kept pressing my contact about it. I received confirmation and a "fix" half an hour ago and I implemented it shortly after.

Thank you VERY much for your persistence Steven, it's very much appreciated.  I don't think any of us here want to put Neowin back on our blacklists but we also just cannot wander around the internet unprotected.

[Steven P. Administrators]

Okay, we have decided to disable the adshield code until they can modify it on their end to work with another script we have that shouldn't be modified.

[corrosive23]

Yeah it's 100% connected to Ad-Guard. If its enabled, I get the errors and messed up homepage. Disabled, page is fine.