How to get rid off hero banners on DEV.to
Tags: meta, privacy
Published: 2020-06-23 18:35:03

If you are anything like me, you don't like ads, tracking, wasting space, wasting transfers and shoving ideologies down my throat in places where there is no need for it.

I dont want to be bombared left and right with things that have nothing to do with why I came to the place. On Twitter, I don't follow people, I mute people, I mute words, I block hashtags. But DEV itself is bombarding me with things that I don't care when I want to learn or teach software development to from/to others.

I come to dev.to for development. Name is DEV.to. This brings us to how homepage of DEV.to looks like right now for a new user (~95% of the screen estate has no content the user came from - critical usability strike. I dont treat cover image of some article as content :) ):

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/ct2ohcbbnexfxm3hmj5t.jpg)

Note: Keep in mind that your version might look different, I have very aggressive uBlock filters, /etc/hosts (19 MB of them) blocking most trackers, etc. I **really** don't want to download things that are exclusively designed to spy on me.

**I love Alan Turing. I think that he saved a lot of lives alongside three great Polish mathematicians working on the Enigma. Without him, probably, I wouldn't do what I do and love. I'm grateful, to say the least.**

I consider this example to break at least three of the things I dont like. Critically, I dont like waste. I spend most of my life reducing waste anywhere I can find it, both private and professional life, both in real and virtual life.

Some time ago there was other banner that I blocked. When writing this article I found `.she-coded-hero-banner__container` block in AdBlock. Again, almost fullscreen banner took vertical space of the webpage. Some other banner was occupying top-right sidebar. I find it offensive on many levels.

Those pushes are hostile to everyone who do not want to celebrate, participate, but just want to use the page. I just want to read developer stuff, and write developer stuff. If I wanted to celebrate something, or support a cause, I would find a way. I don't need/want a banner on a dev website attacking me every time some arbitrary date pops up.

I'm literally getting out of my way to protect myself from those ideologies and movemenets to stay healthy and if I don't find solution to DEV.to hostility, I will definietly change platform for a place where I'm not harassed every month.

Having said that, I think I found solution (at least for me, and you, if you want to)

## Solution: AdBlock (in my case [uBlock origin](https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=ublock+origin))

Your first instinct might be to add custom filter by clicking on element zapper. 

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/evqeqy0af405ya1e5kwd.jpg)

You will end up with filter like:

```
dev.to###hero-html-wrapper
```

But this is not enough. It will work this time, but as I mentioned, last time this div was called `.she-coded-hero-banner__container`, so next time it will be another thing and it will show up. I came with a better idea, after a little inspection of the DOM. This div is always after nav and before body, to take as much space as possible, so we can just block any direct child div with `hero` string inside the id attribute. And because last time `hero` was in the class name, lets add class for a good measure. Better safe than sorry, while we are at it.

```
dev.to###page-content-inner > div[id*="hero"]
dev.to###page-content-inner > div[class*="hero"]
```

I feel much safer already.

## Result

![Alt Text](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/fryw7yf61rui7jifeu32.jpg)

Much better! Only **content** on the screen. Hopefully it will stay that way. I hope there will be no hero images, full screen overlays, sidebar banners, and other distractions from what this site is about.

I hope you set yourself free from those ads as well, and will have more relaxed time on DEV.to.

I will fight for my sanity and peace of mind, but at the end of the day, I'm asking myself if it's worth being in a place where evidently I'm not welcomed.