200531

I found that adding a daily-changing date parameter to my Geocities site URL hides the Yahoo! ad sidebar. This trick likely interacts with Firefox ad blockers to bypass intrusive advertising on the free hosting platform.

Thu, 31 Mar 2005 • Links

When I use the URL http://www.geocities.com/root_node/?200531 to view my site, it doesn’t show the Yahoo! ad bar on the right. But when I use any other number, like http://www.geocities.com/root_node/?200530, or load it plain, like http://www.geocities.com/root_node, it doesn’t work. I suspect the 200531 is related to today’s date (2005 Mar 31), that it changes every day, and that this feature is used by one of Firefox’s ad blockers.

Comments

Jetru 31 Mar 2005 9:15 am: Cool!
Jetru 31 Mar 2005 9:25 am: Hey, your search searches the html.
S Anand 1 Apr 2005 3:51 am: It does use dates. On April 1, I have to use 20051 instead of 200531
S Anand 1 Apr 2005 3:52 am: Yes, Jetru – the search box does a regular expression search of all HTML