"We're right, our programming and testing are infallible, therefore our paying customer is doing something wrong."

Thank you for clarifiying your position.

FWIW, I suspect that few if any users would object to a small amount of travel-related advertising. But that isn't what we're being served (see example above).

As we said before, standard ad blockers work, we've used them ourselves. It seems that you are only interested in arguing instead of allowing us to help you fix your ad blocker and/or identify the browser add-in that is actually causing the issues, so we will not be replying further on this thread. You may reach us via email for help with your individual issue.

As we previously noted, the ad network was contacted and they fixed the issue on their end with the ad content.

For the sake of other thread subscribers, I agree that there's no point in pursuing the ad-blocker problem here. The question of inappropriate advertising is more important in any case -- I don't generally block ads served by sites I regard as 'friendly', such as EF, so if you can sort that the problem goes away. So far, though, it's not sorted.

This was a minute or so ago, i.e. after your last post:

https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...7b0527e93f.png

Not related to any cookies previously stored by my browser, as I cleared the cache and restarted the browser before visiting EF. Not travel-related. So not "fixed".

While I will agree that EF Voice's "bedside manner" in this forum and in e-mail support can come across as brusque, in this case you made a blanket statement about EF not playing nicely with ad blockers, which simply isn't true. I use ABP on Firefox on Linux, and Chrome on a Macbook and a Chromebook, as well as Opera browser for Android with built-in blocking, and have never been asked for a CAPTCHA by EF. You have yet to name your browser or add-ons, which would be a first step to trying to reproduce your issue.

Not saying this is what's going on in your case, but some types of malware can hijack banner ads and effectively substitute their own ads on top of what the site's ad platform originally served up.

If using Windows, one might try Blocking Unwanted Connections with a Hosts File. I think its primary function is to protect your browser, but it has the side effect of stopping most ads. When using it, I don't remember ever being asked for a CAPTCHA by EF; if it's happened, it's been so rare that I've forgotten.

Thank you Zorak and Globaliser.

You're right and I apologise for sowing more unrest than necessary. My troubleshooting was too hurried and I conflated two issues, which made my report less helpful than it might have been. (I use uBlock Origin and Firefox.)

One issue was inappropriate advertising. As of a few minutes ago, that one hasn't been resolved. Many of the ads I see are travel-related, but many are not (I have seen, today, more of the kind of things I posted samples of yesterday).

The other issue is the high number of third-party sites called during a typical visit to EF (around 30, including Twitter and Facebook as well as the usual array of tracking and advertising sites).

Some scripts that EF lets run on third-party servers were incompatible with the JavaScript permissions I had set, which in one case was leading to error messages and/or CAPTCHA chicanery. By relaxing those permissions a little more than I would like, i.e. by allowing EF to 'misbehave' a little, I have been able to stop the error messages.

Globaliser: The MVPS HOSTS list that you linked to is one of the filters available in uBlock Origin. If you choose to use it, as I do, it auto-updates. Easier than the way we used to manage these things, but also easier (see above...) to jump to a slightly wrong conclusion.

FWIW I also use Ghostery in addition to ABP, for restricting trackers that aren't strictly ads, might be worth investigating.

Bug in Comair award results?
 

I'm seeing EF consistently return "No" to all queries for award space on Comair, BA's franchisee in South Africa. There is space that is not being reported, because the availability is confirmed by the BA website.

EF used to be very accurate in relation to this award space, just like for BA mainline flights. Is there a bug, or has EF's access to this information been cut off for some other reason? There is no difficulty seeing space in cash booking classes, as one would expect.

FWIW, the relevant booking classes are U (business class) and X (economy).

Comair is not listed on the Award & Upgrade search results so it's not clear how you are searching for awards on that airline. If you choose "British Airways" it will only return BA coded flights in the Award search. If you would like us to investigate further please email us the specifics of your search/flight, thanks.

It's a franchisee, so they are all BA-coded flights (and they always have been), and it is the BA search that used to bring up these results. And I'm now getting the same universally negative (including falsely negative) results on every single route and every single day that I've now tested this on across the whole of the next 354 days, particularly on JNB-CPT, JNB-DUR and their reciprocals.

If you need a specific example, try 2 December 2018, CPT-JNB. From ba.com, I know that there are award seats on the following flights:
BA6428 U9 X3
BA6406 U7
BA6409 U9
BA6422 U4

EF is returning nothing on every flight across the entire day.

I've been happily using EF for long enough to recognise that this is a systemic change in behaviour, hence my framing of my question in the way I did. EF used to report availability on these Comair flights with the same excellent accuracy as for BA mainline flights. So any assistance would be welcome; in addition, I hope this post will provide comfort to others who are seeing the same problem that there does seem to be some problem here.

It looks like the issue is with BA publishing the flights, as the QF award search, for example, returns an error for that search. When the publishing of the flights is fixed, then ExpertFlyer will also reflect the fix.

Thank you very much - that's very helpful.

When searching a China Airlines award ticket for 1/1/2019, it returns this error:

There is an error in the information you entered.

Is it too far in the future?

Likely, however if you want to know for sure please email us the specifics.

Does expertflyer support married segment logic yet for fare alerts? I wanted to keep an eye out for a specific fare bucket in AAA-BBB-CCC, this bucket is available in AAA-BBB and BBB-CCC, but not when married.