Personally I hate the whole implementation. I've never found anything in those annoying boxes of any use at all. I just don't want a box popping up when I mouse over links. Its just a bad idea. Could you implement a 'permanently disable this feature' option ?
Without knowing anything about Apture's implementation, I'm reasonably certain you could block it with NoScript. For highlight, just wait until it comes up then block "highlight.cloudflare.com" (or whatever). While I don't like NoScript's default behavior, it's a godsend if you allow all globally and just blacklist domains you dislike.
That's a good idea. It's difficult to communicate the purpose of a "permanently opt out of this feature" button from the little widget that pops up, but it's definitely something we could integrate into the main window that expands. Would that be a satisfactory experience for you?
Feel welcome to suggest alternative UI ideas for adding a feature like that, if you have any.
I do like redthroway's suggestion of putting it on it's own subdomain. That makes it easy for noscript or adblock to get rid of that and only that and leave actually useful scripts and content served.
It seems like an easy way to disable it outright and permanently is a feature people would like to have. While noscript (and similar tools) would certainly solve this on a per-visitor basis, if we (CloudFlare) could provide a novel way to present an opt-out in the UI we could then report to our users how many of their visitors ultimately disabled the feature completely. This is just me musing about the possibilities, but overall that seems like it would be more constructive than our users thinking "Oh awesome, another one of those Apture things!" while their users silently grumble and block scripts..
Certainly providing a global opt-out would help your stance in that you care about the end-users, and not just the advertisers using the service. There are probably also ways to figure out how many people opt-out using no-script also.
The notion that they would be willing to take any action to encourage NoScript is wishful thinking to say the least. Its a shame too, but it flies in the face of every aspect of their business model.
For what it's worth, I personally encourage the usage of NoScript, and other similar tools, to my friends and family.
That said, what I'm trying to propose is that the UI for the app could allow site visitors to communicate a dissatisfaction with the app to the site owner, as that seems to me to allow for constructive feedback not possible when scripts are simply blocked outright.
Yeah this is something you can easily get by highlighting text, right clicking and clicking search Google when you really want to know something. Any other time it's going to be more of a hinderance than a help.
Although in saying that I don't mind the ebook highlight a word and get a definition as usually with an ebook you don't want to break the flow and venture back out onto the net, whereas while browsing the net this is perfectly normal.
That's a very good point on both counts. In some ways this duplicates existing functionality (although in our case, it is mostly a side effect of trying to provide our users with the same features they would be losing when Apture is shut down).
As you said, though, there is value in providing contextual information about a topic without breaking the flow of the page. If we could turn Highlight into a tool that captures that value really well, I think the effort would be worth our while.
