What are these accesses to other sites for?

[coulonnus]

Each time I load the main imslp page or the other score website page, I see accesses to unsollicited sites like Peachnote, Paypal etc in the bottom left corner of my browser. If either site is in bad moods the access to imslp is delayed.

Are such sites useful?

[KGill]

I think the site has some embedded javascript from several sites because of heavy linking to them as an affiliated resource (Peachnote, ?Olympiana.fm, ?Joytunes) or because of donations (Paypal). A while back I actually blocked the Peachnote website in /etc/hosts because it was holding things up--it alone added a noticeable delay to each page load. I don't think I've experienced similar issues with the other sites.

[coulonnus]

Thanks. Here I have C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts but it is contains only 127.0.0.1 localhost. Is it the file you mean? How can I edit it to prevent access to these sites? If this works will my browser skip the access silently or become still slower with a warning?

[KGill]

Assuming this works on Windows the same way as on Linux, you can block attempted connections to (or from) other servers by redirecting them to 0.0.0.0 (kind of a "null" IP address). E.g., in my /etc/hosts I have

Code: Select all

127.0.0.1	localhost
(...)
0.0.0.0	www.facebook.com
0.0.0.0	m.facebook.com
0.0.0.0	www.linkedin.com
0.0.0.0	www.addthis.com
(...)
0.0.0.0	www.peachnote.com
(...)

You may need to clear your browser cache to see an effect, but it should happen silently--after making the change, if you try to go to the Peachnote site you will simply get a blank page or a connection error, depending on your browser. On my machine, Firefox just shows about:blank. Effectively your machine will refuse to load any resources from that address, which is why some people use this as an adblocking method.

[coulonnus]

Thanks, it works and causes no blocking. http://www.peachnote.com is in fact http://www.pchnote.com.

Sometimes I believe sites of this category donate $.000001 to imslp at each visit originating from this imslp process.