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Can you write ad-blocker rules to essentially blacklist mention of certain people?
I've just read a journal from someone on another site saying that they wished there was a blacklisting system which stopped them seeing submissions from, to or about certain other users in their feed, as it is potentially trauma-inducing for them to log in and keep seeing them come up. I assume that the person looking for this blacklist isn't realistically able to just leave the site, because it's the most populous of its kind and serves as an art portfolio or source of income.
Is this, or something like it, actually possible to do with custom ad-blocker rules, or do they need to just wait for the site's admins to get around to it?
Yes, generally, though how and with what effect depends on the site, content, markup, and tools used.
If an attribute referencing an author is included, you can block that element and all children using a simple CSS stylesheet rule. Say (assuming these properties are defined):
CSS doesn't (presently) allow for referencing containing elements, so if the author-defining attributes were within the content you wanted to obscure, you're out of luck.
CSS also doesn't enable display manipulation based on the actual non-attribute content of a Web page, so you couldn't, say, block any mention of
blockwordwithin a text, or all pages referencing same.Some "content controls" tools provide this capability. They're usually aimed at parents, schools, or workplaces blocking or modifying (rewriting) websites based on domain, contents, keywords, or other inicia. Increased use of HTTPS (encrypted) transports makes this harder.
Custom Javascript can change virtually any element of a webpage (a reason cross-site javascript is so dangerous), though I'm not a practitioner.
All methods will tend to be highly site-specific.
CSS doesn't, however ublock filter rules do have a has().
Kind of vague, but if said person is using uBlock Origin, they may be looking for procedural cosmetic filters or something along those lines and have those posts hidden.
Edit: Alternatively, uBlock Origin also supports XPath, so that can be used.
Yes, sorry about the vagueness. I didn't want this post to come back to them, because another stated purpose of the blacklist that I neglected to mention in the title (BTW, I can't edit it or reply to your comment from the thread page) was to block people from seeing or interacting with their content. AFAIK, changes like that are solely within the realm of site admins, but it suggested to me that the problem of stalking was one of the motivators.
This was another instance of this issue that we discovered last week - in this case the phrase "custom ad" was preventing uBlock Origin users from being able to take actions.
I created an issue about the problem, including a list of the phrases that will cause this to happen. I'll probably need to treat this more urgently if it's going to keep happening.
Hehehehehe