Digital Spy

Why they disabled the reactions?

""Some of the examples of how this has been misused include users laughing at members discussing their children who have passed away, members using the laughing reaction on members discussing depression, disabilities and other conditions. A good estimate would be 90% of how it's been used is malicious.""

What a dump.

A shame it took them so long to pick up on that when the malicious and trolling laughing had been going on for months. I'd been having a ton of it myself after I'd stood up to a couple of self-appointed moderators in one thread, then they started laughing at every post I made in that thread regardless of the subject.

It certainly explains why the site is so slow to load sometimes!

They seem to have a re-directing advert now that's taking me to a site to "take a survey", complete with voiceover.

uBlock Origin on Chrome isn't giving me any of these issues.

It's just directed me to another site that's actually been blocked by my ISPs web safe filter, co clearly very dodgy.

And it's definately DS doing it, as it's not happening on any of the other tabs I have open on other websites.

Oh how I wish someone would invent an adblocker, which fools the site you are visiting into thinking that there is no adblocker software/application installed in your browser and thus allows you to read the site devoid of any pop up/pop under, rollovers and intrustive side and in page banner static or moving advertising...

..and before anyone pulls out the 'yes, but the site is free and relies on adverts" card.
Shut up - not a valid arguement.
I don't mind small static advertising banners which you can quickly scroll past, ignore and move on, its the moving stuff and autoplay ones that I'd like to see banished for good.

You wouldn't put up with someone holding a full page advertsing page, around 3 feet from your face when walking into a supermarket for 15 seconds - so why put up with it when browsing?

There are add-ons and scripts that claim to fool the detectors, but I've yet to succeed.

Hmm, figured out how to get on Digital Spy and not get the ad-block notification. Using uBlock on Firefox, turn on the "Ignore generic cosmetic filters" option in the Dashboard -> 3rd party filters section. Job done. Easier than I thought. *

This also, according to other posts, may also filter out those irritating "this site uses cookies" notification requirements that some bright spark in the EU decreed we needed.

* (edit - unchecking "Parse and enforce cosmetic filters" seems to have the same effect as well)

It's a game of cat and mouse. The ad block extension developers are constantly finding ways to stop these sort of pop ups, and the advert companies are constantly finding ways to get around the blocks. Unfortunately without fundamentally changing the way the internet works there's not any real way to stop this.

Another way of getting round anti ad-block notices on websites with atrocious advertising practices is to activate the reader mode on your web browser.

Reader mode?