Why not try and continue to let the site be broken for people using adblock? It's their choice to break the user agent. If enough sites are broken with adblock enabled and the content is compelling enough - you would assume they would disable adblock?
As a user of AdBlock, unless it's a site I desperately need to function (there aren't very many of these), having it be broken with AdBlock turned on clues me in that something shady is going on. I'm more likely to simply leave and never come back.
Note here that I'm not against certain kinds of advertising, and I'm all for subscription models and donation incentives and a great many other ways to fund sites. But third party advertising networks have forever lost my trust, and I simply won't tolerate the security risk nor the annoyance any longer. Your site is welcome to require me to disable AdBlock, and that's fine. I don't need to read your posts that badly anyway.
> having it be broken with AdBlock turned on clues me in that something shady is going on
The "something shady" is AdBlock muscling their way into the ad revenue game using you as a way to bludgeon the sites serving the ads. Under no circumstance should an ad blocker prevent the site from working as expected; that's the purview of the site itself.
Did you ever think to change the type of ads you are showing on your site? I'm saying this under the assumption that you are using an ad platform where you plug their code into your site and then they show your user's ads.
Have you thought about handling the advertising yourself and hand picking products and services that are directly applicable to your users and displaying them in an unobtrusive manner?
And as a side note: I consider ads from any ad network to be a security risk and while I respect sites for "politely" asking me to whitelist them I feel it's a misguided approach.
I would guess that losing 30% of the traffic would impact visibility and market share, and that is more costly than giving 30% of viewers content without ads.
A couple reasons. We run extremely lean, and only have one customer service person. If you come to the site every day, and have spent money on some of our content, and then one day the site is broken, that's a problem.
The other reason is it's a community, and the more people we have on the site, the better it is for the site as a whole; more people communicating and interacting with each other, which ideally brings more people and keeps the ones that currently visit.
