Meh, I guess they don't want any reviews then... Sucks to suck, sales will drop and they have nobody to blame but themselves
this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2025
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Mildly Infuriating
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Sadly I'm sure a company as big as PetSmart has done the math and decided they stand to make more from advertising than from a few lost reviews
"Ad blockers prevented your review submission."
No, you prevented the review submission, by taking the time out of your day to write a dialogue box that prevents submissions.
It's such an abuser mentatlity: "Why do you make me hurt you?"
I fucking despise this kind of gaslighting. YouTube does it too, with their "experiencing interruptions?" popup that then takes you right to the FAQ section telling you to disable your adblocker and that it may cause problems. no, you drooling fucking simpletons, you are causing problems deliberately, problems I will circumvent without disabling anything out of pure spite.
The fun part: The delays and interruptions are still way shorter and less annoying that being forcefed two minutes of unskippable ads for some irrelevant junk or service.
Yep that's precisely why I worded the title as I did. Like, you ain't gaslighting me... my adblocker didn't prevent shit. I can leave reviews on every other website, I've never seen this before. Only on your site has it been an issue, so it sounds like a you problem, not a me problem. Ridiculous.
Look at what they did!
Turn it off just to leave an even lower review, mentioning this BS in the review.
"I was going to leave 3 stars. Product was meh. But I dropped it to 1 stars because I had to turn off my adblock just to leave this review.
Do not buy this product. They know it's bad. That's why they want less reviews from people who won't turn off adblock."
Response from our management: "We're sorry you're having issues. Please accept this coupon for 10% off your next purchase!"
This is how I expect their bot to respond.
They would just not approve the review and delete it.
🎯
Of course. This makes perfect sense. How would you have anything relevant to say about the product if you haven’t been advertised at in the past twelve seconds?
They probably mostly want to "improve the advertising experience" .
Leaving a review on the company website is pointless anyway.
What's to stop any malicious merchant from pruning unfavorable reviews? I trust moderated gossip channels with no financial stake in review sentiment over curated marketing advertisements masquerading as “customer reviews”.
Nothing and they do. I once wrote a review that the product caused me issues and it wasn't safe to use and they didn't publish it stating that it didn't meet the website's guidelines.
I dunno, I disagree. I look at reviews and was, in fact, looking at reviews for the thing I wanted to also leave a review on.
Technically, BazaarVoice is the one preventing you from leaving a review.
This is actually an example of technology working correctly. Web sites are able to delegate parts of their functionality to other services that are able to act independently. Your browser refuses to interact with BazaarVoice, but Petsmart continues to function.
It’s also an example of markets working poorly. It’s great that companies can use a third party service to handle reviews, so we don’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel. It’s not great that companies like Petsmart are so big that they don’t have to care about who they delegate that job to. They can use a cheap-as-hell sketchy AI service that will grind their users into an algorithmic paste, and pocket the savings, with no worry that you might go elsewhere (what are you gonna do? shop at kind-hearted Bezos’ store instead?)
Yeah... As a technology person (working IT for many years now), it's more likely that there's some bad interaction between the browser, Adblock and the service that does the reviews. They've found a way to get an image to load regardless if the review applet works.
My bet would be that the Adblock is preventing the site from loading the necessary code to show the review submission "page". This image is up behind the review regardless of if it works, is just that if the review thing works, it covers this up.
Sounds to me that this is a courtesy message basically saying that Adblock thinks the review thing is an ad.
I love the way companies simply refuse to not track us. You guys seen those cookie popups that are like "accept and continue" or "reject and pay" where you have to actually pay to reject cookies? I cannot believe that's legal at all. Total scumbags.
Literally baked into http is a "referrer URL" option.
None of this is new. It's literally built into the protocols we use daily.
Very true, you're right.
It's just that the sort of "depth" and "breadth" of the tracking has evolved, as well as the ways marketers use that information.
I hate the websites that have "Accept all" or "Accept necessary only", but if you use a privacy browser that refuses all cookies the site works anyway.
Their "necessary" cookies aren't actually necessary, you just can't reject them.
I wonder if there's even a difference between "all" and "necessary".
As a web developer, I can confirm that there are sometimes necessary cookies that aren't just for the wankstains in marketing!
What would happen if a browser never saved those cookies? Would the website fail to load, some elements not run, or something else?
I'm always curious about edge cases and failure modes.
Yes, you're spot on; it's mostly about elements and functionality not working. Just as a heads up, I work in the WordPress ecosystem so the following brief descriptions will be focused on PHP based sites. I'm sure there are ways round using cookies, such as using localStorage in JavaScript etc. Anyway!
The biggest thing you'll run into is anything to do with login systems. Any website that offers a login/account typically makes use of cookies, in order to let the website "remember" that you're logged in, between page navigation.
One of our clients offers a comparison calculator for investments. This calculator relies on cookies when you want to "save" your results, and also makes use of them when you're not logged in, in order to allow you to access your previous runs of the calculator without having to create an account.
Another of our clients, also in the financial space, produces documents containing financial info about funds, and marketing materials. These docs are subject to strict compliance rules determining what can be shown to users based on what "type" of investor is viewing the site, and where in the world they're viewing from.
Anybody visiting the site self-identifies by manually selecting an investor "type" and a location. This info gets set into a cookie, and the site serves content based on the values in that cookie. If the site can't identify the cookie or it has an invalid value, it'll basically be unusable, in order to protect the company themselves.
Another example might be shopping carts or session storage. Anything that persists from page to page. Does the site have an option for dark mode display? Probably stored in a cookie. Option to change the display language? Yeah, also likely a cookie.
Yeah, 100%! And the languages point generally opens up to a third-party system like WeGlot, whether the cookie is first-party or not. It's sort of amazing to me how collaborative the modern web is, but also just how insecure it can be.
It can be really locked down but I would say at least half of the wordpress sites online (and wordpress powers something like 20%+ of the whole open internet, iirc) pull in all sorts of third-party scripts and code that isn't vetted by the people including them (including me! Only so many hours in a workday, after all).
FWIW you could do this with the localStorage API.
Funny enough, I mentioned that in my first paragraph as I've had to do that for a client recently who had some specific niche use case for something that wouldn't allow cookies to be used.
It's not.
I usually go into zapper mode on ublock to remove the pop up without agreeing, but they probably treat that as "accept and continue".
They're not allowed to collect data as long as the "yes" button hasn't been clicked. Now, in practice, implementation correctness may vary
Much better: when this happens, I block frames and scripts from loading through ublock.
I personally have never seen a pay to reject. What types of websites have you come across that do that? I’m genuinely curious.
A lot of news sites! Let me see if I can find one.
I'm pretty sure I saw it on Autosport earlier today. Just opened it in Chrome (ew) -- see screenshot!
Edit: reading the popup, I assume the legal loophole is that you technically CAN revoke consent after accepting, without paying, by visiting a whole separate page and doing it there. Ultra scummy!
Oh! Ok. I was under the impression the verbiage had the word Reject in it somewhere; that’s on me. It makes much more sense now, and I get what you’re saying. Thanks for the clarification!
I actually do think I've seen variations in this wording over the course of a few months. I'm going to go digging around sites I think are probably less scrupulous to see if I can find examples.
Boom, gotcha. First absolute rag that came to mind. Check it! Screenshot:
Edit: also it's totally on me that you thought the word Reject was in there - I put it in quotes and then provided an example that didn't contain it, sorry! 😂
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Which now renders their site useless .... I'll go on your site to look up basic info ... then go to your store to get what I want and even visit some other store or service that could give me the same product.
It's a disincentive to want to use their site in the future.
I've stopped using several store websites because of this. Then when I want an actual product .... I'll call the store and ask them to look for the product for me. If they have it great, if they don't, I'll look for it elsewhere or figure out some other solution for myself that doesn't involve any of their dumb websites.
I'm regressing from the internet and use people contact more and more because of this stupidity. I'm going back to the way I did things in the 90s and early 2000s where I would just use their store flyer as a guide, call the local store to ask for something and then go look for it myself because the online services today are so intrusive and needlessly complicated that its faster and more useful to not go online.
Is it possible that their review form functions on some kind of script language that is commonly filtered by ad blockers?
Browsing the site on mobile / without an Ad Blocker, I’m not seeing any ads. Might just need to reduce the filtering level.
No. A lot of websites deliberately disable functionality when they detect an ad-blocker to annoy you into disabling it.
I wonder how many people that actually works on..
I'm surprised they don't wait for you to hit the submit button before dropping this on you so people feel invested and motivated to do as they're told because of the sunk cost in time and effort writing the review.
I can't remember what pissed me off but fuck Petsmart.
I switched to Chewy and local pet shops.
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They probably use a 3rd party for reviews, so the ad blocker accidentally blocks that service
If my ad-blocker is blocking it, I'm certain there's nothing accidental about it.
Sounds like the 3rd party site isn't trustworthy.
I'd recommend Chewy.
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