Ad-blocking in Sunbelt Personal Firewall

Reader Glenn Bryson wrote to me this week via the to ask:

Message: hi, Thanks for your very helpful advice. On your recommendation, I upgraded to Vipre antivirus and antispyware. Since then, I have a lot of ads blocked with this error statement: "Ad blocked here by SPF" Does this have anything to do with Vipre? How do I lower the bar on what ads are blocked? Once again, thanks for all your help. Glenn Bryson
I wrote back to Glenn to tell him that Vipre wasn't the issue — the message indicated that the ad-blocking was being done by Sunbelt Personal Firewall.

I strongly recommended that he turn off that feature in SPF. It works by wrapping a big JavaScript around the whole web page as its being downloaded. Then, before the page displays, the JavaScript runs to block the ads.

When I tried it initially, I found that the ad-blocking slowed up my web browser. More importantly, ads are a critical part of the "free Internet" — advertising supports almost all the free web sites.

Of course, my site and newsletter are supported by ads, so I feel strongly about people blocking ads.

Since Glenn wanted to know how to control SPF's ad blocking, I referred him to my review of Sunbelt Personal Firewall.

As part of my review, I show screen shots of the settings that I use for all my web surfing. There's a clickable image just below the adblocking section of the review, which shows my web filterig settings:

Enable Web Filtering — OFF (unchecked)
Block Advertisements — OFF (unchecked)
Block JavaScripts — OFF (unchecked)
Block VBScripts — OFF (unchecked)
Block ActiveX — OFF (unchecked)
I also referred him to an earlier article that I wrote when the program was still called Sunbelt Kerio Personal Firewall