My project site has been blocked by ad blockers

After a few months working on MetricsWave, I recently discovered that some blacklisting lists are including my site domain, not the tracking script, but my landing page domain.

About 65 million people are using Ad blockers right now.

MetricsWave, a Google Analytics and Amplitud alternative, has recently been added to the block lists and the home page and web application has become inaccessible.

The problem is that, right now, all users who have an ad blocker extension installed cannot access our landing page or web app. The will see something like these.

I can understand that they block the tracking script, but this doesn't seem right to me.

They are blocking my entire website!

Other competitors like Google Analytics or Plausible sites are not blocked.

How am I supposed to compete with other tools being blocked?

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Table of contents

1. How could this happen?

2. What options do I have now to solve this problem?

1. How could this happen?

I really had no idea how this world worked. There is always a first time for everything.

Something, so important, that can do so much damage to a business, depends only on one person.

One person who, by adding your domain to a text file, can make 65 million people unable to access your website.

It's as simple as that.

And the worst part is that you can't do anything about it. If this person doesn't want to remove your domain from the list, you're screwed.

In my case, this was the list.

You can see information about who is blocking a domain in the extension, in this case uBlock Origin.

2. What options do I have now to solve this problem?

The first one and simple is to talk with the author of that list.

Send him a message, try to be polite, and explain to him what is happening. I explain to him that he is blocking all my sites and web applications, not just the tracking script.

What he replied is that he couldn't block the script alone if he was serving it from the same domain, so I proposed to move it to a subdomain, and he was fine with that.

I have been lucky.

Another option is to open an issue in the uBlock Origin extension repository on GitHub. But trust me, if you have to do this, you're in trouble.

They are not polite; most probably, they are going to discard your issue and tag it as "won't fix" in a few hours.