At some point, Yahoo started sticking a really annoying popup on basically every single Flickr page, if you aren’t logged in with a Yahoo ID. Blocking these popups is reasonably straightforward with uBlock or ABP, but it took me slightly longer than it should have to figure it out.

As usual, here’s the tl;dr version. Add this to your uBlock “My filters”:

! Block annoying Flickr login popups
www.flickr.com##.show.mini-footer.signup-footer

That’s it. Note that this doesn’t really “block” anything, it’s a CSS hiding rule. For this to work you have to ensure that ‘Cosmetic Filters’ in uBlock / uBlock Origin is enabled.

The slightly-longer story as to why this took more than 10 seconds of my time, is because the default uBlock rule that’s created when you right-click on one of the popups and select ‘Block Element’ doesn’t work well. That’s because Yahoo is embedding a bunch of random characters in the CSS for each one, which changes on each page load. (It’s not clear to me whether this is designed expressly to defeat adblockers / popup blockers or not, but it certainly looks a bit like a blackhat tactic.)

Using the uBlock Origin GUI, you have to Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on a Mac) on the top element hiding rule in order to get a ‘genericized’ version of it that removes the full CSS path, and works across page reloads. I’d never dug into any of the advanced features of uBlock Origin before — it’s always just basically worked out of the box, insofar as I needed it to — so this feature was a nice discovery.

Why, exactly, Yahoo is shoving this annoying popup in front of content on virtually every Flickr page, to every non-logged-in viewer, isn’t clear, although we can certainly speculate: Yahoo is probably desperate at this point to get users to log in. Part of their value as a company hinges on the number of active users they can claim. So each person they hard-sell into logging in is some amount more they’ll probably get whenever somebody steps in and buys them.

As a longtime Flickr user, that end can’t come soon enough. It was always disappointing that Flickr sold out to Yahoo at all; somewhere out there, I believe there’s a slightly-less-shitty parallel universe where Google bought Flickr, and Yahoo bought YouTube, and Flickr’s bright and beautiful site culture was saved just as YouTube’s morass of vitrol and intolerance became Yahoo’s problem to moderate. Sadly, we do not live in that universe. (And, let’s be honest, Google would probably have killed off Flickr years ago, along with everything else in their Graveyard of Good Ideas. See also: Google Reader.)

Perhaps once Yahoo is finally sold and broken up for spare parts, someone will realize that Flickr still has some value and put some effort into it, aside from strip-mining it for logins as Yahoo appears to be doing. A man can dream, anyway.