{"id":16648,"date":"2016-03-01T14:34:11","date_gmt":"2016-03-01T13:34:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jurnsearch.wordpress.com\/?p=16648"},"modified":"2016-03-01T14:34:11","modified_gmt":"2016-03-01T13:34:11","slug":"block-the-new-animated-gifs-in-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/2016\/03\/01\/block-the-new-animated-gifs-in-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"Block the new animated .GIFs in Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"

There appears to be a new type of annoying animated .GIF on Twitter, a type which this morning somehow managing to get into my totally locked-down and text-only Twitter keyword-search stream. <\/p>\n

Currently being used in the wild by Russian Kickstarter spammers and others… <\/p>\n

\"unblockable\"<\/p>\n

This type of animation was appearing in my search stream despite my having all animated .GIF loading turned off at the browser-root (via Firefox’s about:config<\/em> control-panel). It seems to have multiple fall-backs, to things like .MP4 and HTML5 video and even static .JPG. Thankfully I have Flash uninstalled, so there’s no fallback to that. I guess that either the .MP4 or the HTML5 loading was bypassing the AdBlock methods I use to block all images posted to Twitter, and also my video-loading blockers. <\/p>\n

It’s also armoured against selective page-element blockers, because it has multiple top-layers containing fiddly video controls and buttons. This means that (for Firefox users who use the add-ons AdBlock Plus + Element Hiding Helper for AdBlock Plus to block this sort of page-junk) it’s incredibly difficult to remove via the usual “Select an Element to Hide…” method. <\/p>\n

Instead, I had success with right-clicking on the animation itself, selecting the AdBlock option there, then setting the following option as a global block with a * wildcard…<\/p>\n

||twitter.com\/i\/videos\/tweet\/*<\/strong><\/p>\n

And once that was done, my stream was once again super-easy to quickly scan-by-eye for those few links to genuinely useful content…<\/p>\n

\"better\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There appears to be a new type of annoying animated .GIF on Twitter, a type which this morning somehow managing …<\/p>\n

Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jurn-tips-and-tricks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16648\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/jurnsearch\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}