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blocking Snapshots popups

I hate Snapshots™ popups. Snapshots™ seem very proud of their creation, however I have never seen any possible reason you'd want these intrusive fucking things on your website:

Anatomy of a Snapshots(tm) intrusion. 1. Bastard icon heralding annoyance. 2. Laughably out-of-date screenshot. 3. Huge window that adds no value.

All they do is get in the bloody way. Now, you might think why get angry? just click the handy-dandy little "disable" button! Then you realise the bloody thing doesn't work. The moment you clear cookies, sneeze or look away for five seconds the sods are back.

If you have ad blocking software you might be able to get rid of them that way; but I prefer to get medieval on Snapshots™ arse. I don't want to see them again just because I installed a new browser or something (I do that a bit, I'm a web developer and have at minimum five browsers installed at any one time).

blocking Snapshots™ using the hosts file

Let's block these suckers at the hosts file level. First, find and edit %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts ... Commonly the directory is C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc and hosts is a text file. You may need to edit the properties to turn off "read only" (you can switch it back to read only when you're done).

Once you're in the hosts file, add these lines (of course you can edit the comment to taste):

# fuck off snapshots
127.0.0.1 shots.snap.com
127.0.0.1 spa.snap.com
127.0.0.1 snap.com
127.0.0.1 ixnp.com
127.0.0.1 direct.shots.snap.com

Save the file, happy days. As far as I know this works in Windows XP, Vista, 2000... probably all versions of Windows. The Mac equivalent has to be done on the command line, because apparently Apple thinks inside every GUI-loving Machead there's a UNIX geek trying to get out.

So anyway, get on in to your hosts file and consign Snapshots™ to the oblivion it so richly deserves.

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Comments

Anonymous indieisaconcept  

July 02, 2009 10:47 pm

If your using a MAC, you should definately use an app called GASMASK to edit your host file. Really great tool and supports profiles.

Anonymous Anonymous  

July 03, 2009 10:00 am

Oh man those things really crap me off. Cheers for the info on blocking those things.

Here's an interesting fact, %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts is derived from linux's /etc/hosts setup. It even has the exact same layout, except microsoft's contribution of it's copyright comment. Is that legal?????

Anonymous Anonymous  

October 20, 2009 6:24 am

Thanks for this. I hope it works! To Anonymous: yes, it's an RFC (Request for Comment: an Internet open standards document), so anyone can use it.

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