Slashdot Mirror
Pop Up Advertising Continues to Suck
djchristensen sent us a link to a yahoo article detailing those obnoxious pop up ads from souless marketroids whose mothers don't love them any more. I own a ton of X10 stuff, but I'll never purchase another item from them. And thank god that the modern web browsers have helpful options like 'disable window.open for this domain' rendering this sort of torture harmless.
Because very few people like the same group of sites enough to pay for them. Revenue sharing would also be very complicated to work out between groups of sites. Everybody "gets a slice" makes neither the IRS nor your creditors feel warm and fuzzy. At some point you get down to numbers and that's when the fighting gets ugly.
I work at a media company which produces trade magazines (ie:we give them away free but you have to give us all your information and we send you tons of junk mail and sell your name, address, and phone number and children... we haven't sold emails... yet), trade shows, and internet websites. Recently (like in the last week or so) several of the subscription managers for some of these magazines started calling me and asking if it were possible to put a "POPUP button" (they really don't grasp the idea here) on their websites which would then direct people to the subscription forms. Evidently one or two of them had attended a DMA conference where some marketroid claimed to have seen a 25% increase in the number of people filling out the subscription forms... so naturally like good business "sheepeople" they all want to follow a tried and true method. However, when I told then that it would totally cheapen the site to a level of "porn" they were a bit taken back. As of yet I haven't been forced into doing anything but I'm waiting for it.
Now let's take a look at that mailbox.
*Snicker*
If you don't want stuff messing with your system software, then don't install it as a privileged user.
What's that you say? You're running Windows? No problem. Just audit the source of the program, remove the evil bits, recompile, and install that instead.
What's that you say? No source? Looks like you just have to take what they give you and be happy with it.
Does anyone know?
Mozilla has been able to disable pop-unders and pop-overs since AT LEAST 0.9. There's just no UI for it. Add this to your user.js:
n ", "noAccess");
,
. op en", "sameOrigin");
user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.ope
To allow specific sites:
user_pref("capability.policy.allowpopups.sites"
"http://www.mozilla.org http://bugzilla.mozilla.org");
user_pref("capability.policy.allowpopups.Window
The site for one of my local newspapers has popup ads now. The front page also refreshes, so a new window pops up every 10 minutes. I accidentally left my system on that page for several hours, and was left with a pile of windows to close. Really annoying.
--
I control my own network (hey, three whole boxen ;-), and a local DNS service. x10.com has been added to my list of locally managed addresses, effectively blackholing the entire shootin' match.
That said, yes, Junkbuster is useful and effective as well. And I use it.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
After getting sick of some popup ads, I was pointed at The Internet Junkbuster , which, as the name implies, gets rid of the junk. Completely. I haven't seen an ad since I installed it. It's free, it's GPL'd, it does the job, and it's easy to install. What more could you ask for?
--
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
If you have window.open disabled and so never see the ads, how do they annoy you so much?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This subject has come to us, pre-flogged, like the dead horse it is, so I'll be brief.
1) Block ads. Proxies. Junkbuster.
2) Disable Java, disable JavaScript, whenever possible, disable, disable, disable.
3) Avoid sites with annoying ads, wherever possible. Like those annoying OSDN sites... some even with banners on the top and the bottom!
4) This is NEWS??
5) oh... there is no five. I lost interest. Sorry. What was this about again?
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
4. Add bookmarks to specific folders/submenus.
Mozilla does this rather nicely, actually. I think this feature was added in one of the more recent milestones, so I can see why you might have thought it wasn't there. Mozilla is quite nice these days (and 0.9.3 just branched - woohoo!) - not to say that Konqueror isn't, of course.
-----
Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
Or lack the cash to buy a newer than two year old machine. I put Netscape 6 on my wife's 32MB P-333 laptop. After loading two (2) pages in ten (10) minutes, off it came.
Hal Duston
hald@sound.net
It seems that foxtrot is catching on. :)
:) haha.
I just thougt it was funny that I read this story and the comic at the same time.
Can you see Iron City here?
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
You obviously don't use a lot of sites that requre logins. For instance, I was mystified why I couldn't log into my online broker or either of my bank accounts using mozilla until I remembered that I'd disabled JavaScript, which disabled the pop-up window that allowed me to type in my password. So as long as we're all just using the web to browse slashdot, your solution is great.
Thanks for playing.
---sheath
And as an evil content provider, I can also assure you that we wouldn't bother selling popunder space unless it did have a significant positive influence on the bottom line.
Pop-unders have doubled my ad income, and we see about $2-$3 CPM for them. However, we use an ad provider that 1) only sends on pop-up per session and 2) doesn't send an individual user the same pop-up more than once per week.
So we sell 10 or 20 times as many banners and pop-ups, but the pop-ups still make us about the same amount of income as banners.
I'm hoping to lose popunders as soon as we can land an effective audio or video ad deal, but the market just isn't there yet.
32MB on a P333? That's awfully low.
Too bad laptop RAM is so expensive - I think
more like 256MB would make a big difference.
-Kevin
Maybe it gets *you* something that looks like a violin but bigger, but for most people it's "Voila, two more windows".
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
That's the way I like it, anyway. My opinion on javascript varies depending on usage from evil incarnate to merely useless and unecessary. I've yet to see a site that is "enhanced" by javascript. As such, I'd much prefer to just turn it on for those few sites that need it and I want to see enough to put up with JS.
The enemies of Democracy are
That's only because no one has bothered to do this on Gopher pages... yet. (okay, so they'd have to be HTML pages)
--
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I hate those stupid "Zoom Zoom" ads too, and as a mozilla user I don't have to worry about the popups either...
Yes, sometimes you do need JavaScript (my bank is the same). I've found, however, that very few of my regular or semi-regular sites need Javascript, and those few I can easily add to the exception list for Mozilla.
Most sites that require a login will work quite happily if you log in as usual and allow them to set a couple of cookies. Then you can turn everything off, and the site will continue to work fien everytime you go there, as long as you make sure to keep the cookies it set that first time.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Junkbusters and the like are pretty good, but this program called Proxomitron is a step above. It does all the normal rewrite features plus a few added features. http://spywaresucks.org/prox/ Rewrites html for both incoming and outgoing, rewrites headers, cookie control, ad control, full logging, and much more.. I currently use this with mozilla, and all ads say [AD] and no popups. Faster browsing, and a easy "Bypass" button for websites that bitch. One of the hacks I used it for was to rewrite java settings, so online games applets would read my settings. Also, you can make Mozilla report back to servers thats its IE5.5 in the headers. Or its default "Space Bison/0.02 [fu] (Win67; X; SK)"
I took proxomitron to work, and realized, that its a great proxy switcher. I was able to put the network proxy, production proxy and a 3rd proxy to a dmz. All I had to do was set my browser to localhost, and then click on proxomitron in the tool tray, and select the proxy i wanted. Another feature I just started to use, this program still amazes me.
Actually you should purchase from smarthome.com they give you the products without the X10 sticker over the real name. (and the home automation products that are X-10 (the protocol not the company, they are not related in any way) are actually superior quality from leviton instead of the crap sold at X10)
X10 is a clearinghouse for crap.. they get products after the manufacturer has decided to offload them or has switched models.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Of course, Media Metrix is treating every ad display as a page view, which really makes the statistics misleading.
bp
I dig OmniWeb a LOT. It allows me to use regeps to blacklist ad servers. I haven't seen an ad from a given server a second time in over a month.
/., but your banner ads don't show up in my browser. BWAHahahahahaha!!! As a result, /. perfomance has incresed dramatically.
These are the standard regeps all perlers know and love. I can also filter out all images that are not from the server I typed in, and all images that have file sizes common to ads.
Sorry
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Find e-mail addresses of people at the offending company and subscribe them to their own service. Surely they would like to take advantage of the wonderful spam they offer!
...Logitech Webcam
:-))
Perhaps because I have annoying ads disabled
This was actually suggested by someone on Kuro5hin, but I think it's a good idea. The idea of paying for a web site with no ads doesn't usually generate much support, unfortunately. I myself am guilty of not donating money to sites I frequent. The idea suggested was to use something similar to MS's passport site.
Why can't five or six different web sites get together that have common characteristics and charge one rate to access content on all these sites? I would gladly pay one overall bill to access five of my favorite sites rather than having to pay each one less. Say Slashdot gets X% of the total, Kuro5hin gets a slice, bluesnews, etc. Then those who do pay get the sites with no ads plus one general login account for all sites.
Just a thought.
-Frijoles-
No shit. That little Eddie Munster mother fucker freaks me out.
For a good time call www.sawkie.com
I don't like these popup X10 things because half the time the data doesnt show up and netscape comes up and says so cause of some error or another blah blah blah. I just wanted to post something cause I haven't posted in such a long time.
_joshua the Loki tech support guy person
A story on how Yahoo's testing pop-under advertising, and it's running on... Yahoo.
That would like it if boycottadobe.com was made with Adobe products...
<meta name="generator" content="Adobe GoLive 5">
Oh, er, i mean...
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Well, I'm not going to say that Yahoo is just another porn site, but, well, you've read the stories, and now you've seen the ads and been bounced around to other sites.
... I'll change my homepage from Sneakemail to PopUp Killer-- for those of us on Win32 who can't run Konquerer.
Nah, because then they can just put the open command inside any link on the page. So when you go to the main New York Times page from your bookmarks, you don't get any bookmarks. But each link has an onClick="open X10 window", so each time you read a story it pops up a new window.
The only way to fix this is with Mozilla's solution -- block by site name. Hopefully there will eventually be a UI for this feature, and maybe a 'warn me before opening a new window/remember this decision' prompt.
-Mike
The add isn't really that annoying, actualy.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The adds still pop up, they just immediatly dissapear.
I rerouted ads.x10.com to localhost in my hosts file. Now I see my either my 404 error page or the root page when an add pops up.
It's kinda funny, actualy.
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
Asside from number 3, mozilla does have all of those features.
What I'd really like to see would be a way to see what popups were trying to pop up, incase some site had used pop-up navigation
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
a pop-up ad on an article talking about the evils of pop-up ads
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
Hehe, can't seem to find that feature in IE or Netscape?
What is the dealieo??
And you can bet that between NPR, Slashdot, the New York Times, etc covering X10, they're doing business like never before.
I've clicked on more banner ads from Slashdot and oreilly.com than any other sites I currently visit. These sites cater directly to my demographic -- computer geeks who like toys and like to learn. Delivering such relevant advertising is worth lots of money to advertisers.
Some people don't like to hear this solution, but I truly think it works better than anything else proposed.
USER REGISTRATION
Get web users to reveal some details about themselves. In return, offer them a quality web experience with non-intrusive advertisements that they may truly be interested in! And finally, give them an opportunity to change their profile easily, and allow them to opt-in (NOT OPT-OUT! Big difference) to other types of ads, like e-mails.
Web advertising is supposed to accomplish 3 things:
- Strengthen their brand recognition
- Drive traffic
- Drive Internet sales
These goals cannot be met without targeting the people who may be interested in your product/service!
If someone has an ad for a new Asus P4 motherboard with SDRAM support or a special deal on that new Acura RSX Type-S, damnit I WANT TO SEE IT! However, I DO NOT want to see ads for baby diapers or Retirement Monthly.
You make a great point. All these ads popups etc are only annoying to the people who are too stupid to do something about it. Like most sheeple on this planet they will use whatever browser came with their computer, set to whatever so called security settings it came with, and of course whatever home page was preset.
We have to start realizing that the sheeple allow us to have free content. We certainly can avoid popups, banner ads, cookies, and whatever else we deem annoying or harmful. If everybody was able to install junkbusters or a re-write proxy or if everybody could download mozilla and install it then the providors would have to think of different ways to raise money.
Let the ads get as annoying as they want to, they don't bother the smart people on the stupid have to look at them.
War is necrophilia.
Sure, it keeps ads from showing up, but it's also a big pain in the ass.
i think honda owns mazda. perhaps you fell right into their little plan. then again, you probably knew that you tricky consumer you.
Now ads are starting to show up which don't have window frames around them. This may be an IE specific "feature", however, they don't need to have a close button on them. All I've seen so far have close links on them, but this is clearly not a requirement. Once these come into widespread use, nearly everyone will get ad-blockers. Unfortunately, this will probably mean that a law will be passed outlawing ad-blocking proxies.
You're making it excessively complicated. First, laws don't have to make logical sense, they just have to be passed by congress. They can prohibit you from doing almost anything. All that needs to be done is to extend copyright law, or have a judicial opinion which says that you can't display a page except as authorized by the copyright holder. Throw in a new anti-circumvention law ala DMCA, and it is illegal to own ad-blocking software. Presto. You are arguing that each of your five points is impossible. The government simply has to rule that you must do each of your five things without any compensation from the government.
I haven't had a problem with X10 ads since I visited here:
http://www.x10.com/x10ads.htm
and clicked on the "click this link to remove the ads" link.
At least they were SOMEWHAT responsible.
Also interesting to note that they refer to the popunder ads as a "problem" ('Ad-blocking software will also help with this problem.'). (-:
Edit>Preferences>Advanced>Enable JavaScript for Navigator = NO
There, no more nasty pop-up ads (for Netscape/Mozilla) atleast.
Bite me x10.
Not to mention that pop-overs can be closed as they are loading. Pop-unders require much more work. I think that's really why they were invented.
1. Disable pop-unders and pop-overs.
Mozilla does this. In fact, it does it better than Konqueror (though there's no ui for it, yet).
2. View the Web in anti-aliased fonts.
I've found anti-aliased fonts to be over-rated. Crappy fonts still look crappy and good fonts don't really need anti-aliased.
4. Add bookmarks to specific folders/submenus.
Mozilla has been doing this for quite some time, now.
5. Enjoy browsing the Web.
I enjoy browsing the web more with Mozilla than with Konqueror, but YMMV.
You can also check out Worthington Distribution and Bass Home Electronics for a couple of places for interesting stuff. Their web sites are not as polished as Smart Home, but the prices tend to be better and if you call them the personal service is much bettr.
My name is not spam, it's patrick
Home Automation & Linux -- now I know I'm a geek
This is a feature, not a hack. People have been able to rebrand IE as well as customize other parts of Windows for years. X10 just got their hands on an OEM Adaptation Kit and went nuts.
Now, if they'll just get AA fonts
Just a note that the Qt-port of mozilla already anti-aliases fonts. The port is not nearly usable yet, but if you want to try it:
http://www.linux.ucla.edu/~dimator/qt-mozilla/
(PS:
I have Mozilla 0.9.2 installed right now, and it's way slower...
Really? On my machine, Mozilla takes less time to startup, and less time to load pages... I'll put up with the extra bloat that it does have for the best site rendering on *nix.)
---
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
This looks cool, but I'd like to have more granular control over javascript opening windows. In particular, I'd like to only dissallow Window.open calls when they are hooked up to BODY's event handlers (mainly, ONLOAD, and ONUNLOAD, which are the main one's used to trigger those damn popups).
---
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Well, there are two useful utils to help combat ads.
First one is AdExt which blocks the ads right in the page. Best of all its GPL'd and I'm working on porting it to MacOS X and Linux so that everyone can enjoy it. This is also one of the few ad-removing tools I support/sponsor. Oh, it also kills the annoying shock ads like the shoot/punch/whack the monkey from TreeLoot.
Second one is NoAds, which kills the popup ads which AdExt didn't snag. Its also free and works quite well (no proxy mods like AdExt needs).
Brielle
"All advertising is annoying to a certain extent, and the effectiveness of the pop-unders is driven by their ability to generate sales, not by their branding or traffic-driving effect," he said.
This article misses a fundamental difference between tranditional ads (banner ads and interstitials) and pop-up ads. If a site is covered with banner ads, you can leave the site. If a television station shows 50% ads, you can change the channel. But with pop-up ads, you have to go through extra effort to close the advertisements. To make things worse, it's often difficult to find out which of the many windows you have open triggered the ad, so it's hard to avoid the ads in the future.
That's why I'm trying to come up with a spec for Mozilla to block annoying pop-ups without breaking sites that use window.open for links, and without breaking bookmarklets. I threw this proposal around the mozilla newsgroups (n.p.m.security and n.p.m.ui) last week, and it met a mixed response, so I'm curious what the slashdot crowd thinks. The bug numbers referenced can be looked up on Bugzilla.
Most current browsers, including Mozilla, allow a class of profitable denial of service attacks. These attacks involve opening a large number of ad windows, or opening a new ad window each time the user tries to close an open one. Unlike most other forms of advertisement in any medium, these ads do not even give the user a chance to leave the site rather than view the ads, and cannot be ignored because they're in your way. Most of the sites using this type of DoS are adult sites, but there are are others, such as exitfuel.com partners (see bug 84749 for an example).
Somewhat less annoying are ordinary pop-up and pop-under ads. Some users think of them as interstitials, no more annoying than television ads. Some users are confused by them because they're used to having only one browser window open at a time. Some users are annoyed by them to the point where they'll immediately stop visiting a site that uses them or advertises in them.
The solution we come up with should:
a. Not be vulnerable to denial-of-service attacks such as "hydras" and cascading pop-up ads, at least with the default settings.
b. Not force Netscape to choose between (not being able to show pop-ups on netscape.com) and (being vulnerable to a widely exploited denial of service attack).
c. Have a user-interface simple enough that mpt won't complain about the number of prefs added.
d. Not break a large number of existing sites. Breaking a few sites is ok: pop-ups annoy a lot more people than browsers using alt text for tooltips, and we changed that at the expense of breaking more than several sites.
e. Make it possible to use bookmarklets and benign javascript in web pages while disallowing pop-up ads.
Here's my proposed plan:
1. Provide a pref:
Web pages may open new browser windows:
( ) Always
(*) Only when I click on the page or select "open in new window"
( ) Only when I select "open in new window"
See bug 55696 for some ideas about how the third option might work.
2. If "Always" is selected, windows opened by javascript will require a click before they can call window.open anyway. This will let users kill "hydras" as easily as they can kill normal pop-up ads. However, after the user clicks, the window will revert to the "Always" setting, because the user may have started using the window as a normal browser window.
3. Limit the number of consecutive window.opens to 3 or so. If a web page exceeds that limit, deny access to the last window.open call. This will break the "open selected links" bookmarklet , but bug 9274 will make up for that.
4. Disallow window.open, alert, prompt, and confirm in and after the onunload event (bug 33448).
5. Make sure a failed window.open call is reported to the user in some way (bug 47128, bug 83131).
6. Perhaps allow holding Ctrl while a page loads to enable onload pop-ups.
7. Allow power users to change the settings for specific sites or groups of sites using zone prefs (ui: bug 38966).
8. Make it so that activating a bookmarklet counts as a click, and selecting "open bookmark in new window" on a bookmarklet works similarly to selecting "open link in new window".
The shareholder is always right.
I don't _want_ my web browser to have the job of filtering these things out. I've got other programs to do this and they do a much better job.
An external program can't filter something like eval("wind" + "ow.op" + "en(...)"); without blocking all eval calls. It can't tell the difference between a web page using window.open because you surfed to that site, and a page using it because you clicked on something within the site. It can't tell the difference between a single window.open used as part of a link and while(1)window.open(); used in the same context.
Well, maybe it could, but it would have to emulate most of your browser.
The shareholder is always right.
Because the pop-unders tend to form above, and then go below on linux, they are actually far more obtrusive, and that's part of why people hate them.
Actually, the same thing happens on WinNT and Win98, at least with IE and Mozilla.
Another way pop-unders can interrupt your chain of thought: the window.focus() that call that differentiates pop-unders from pop-ups causes the site that creates the pop-under to jump in front of whatever you were reading. So if you loaded about.com in one window while reading Slashdot, you would see a pop-under appear, and then the about.com window would jump in front of the ad and in front of slashdot.
The shareholder is always right.
"souless marketroids whose mothers don't love them any more."
Yeah, those horrible pieces of shit. They should all die for trying to find ways for people to actually pay their bandwidth bills, so that all those web sites you like to visit can actually afford to stay up, you arrogant, selfish piece of shit.
Apparently you are using dialup or another low-speed connection. It sounds to me like you switch back to the /. windows while the other is loading. When the pop-under window starts, it calls window.focus for its creator, bringing the focus back to the window that you did not have in front.
Or perhaps you are talking about the stupid Win2000 problems where the Z-order of windows changes or is not followed? I hate that!
Hello little man. I will destroy you!
You can do all sorts of neat things with Mozilla. Pity there isn't a pretty GUI for the straights to use to configure them. I'm running at home here with javascript pop-ups disabled and all animation turned off. It's amazing how much less obnoxious the web can be with just a few tweaks to your user prefs...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Quick! Name a company that manufactures small web cams!
Either you said "X10" or you thought "X10" and then tried to quickly come up with another company name because you hate X10's ads so much.
As the token slashdot reader who works in marketing (Technical Marketing to be precise, but the sleeze travels by osmosis), I want to weigh in here.
The point of advertising is name recognition, rather that to directly influence sales. That's the reason why it's so hard to quantify how successful an ad campaign has been: generally $x ad dollars does not equal $x increase in revenue. One can say that after an $x ad campaign went out, the company saw a $y increase in sales, but one cannot assume that the increase in sales was directly related to the ad campaign.
So the idea is to get you to think of the brand name when you think of a product type. X10 is successfully doing that, although I don't condone the method. So for every person that refuses to buy X10's product on principle, there's probably 3-4 people that will recognize the product name but will forget the annoying context.
Ads do work the way people think, assuming that the person thinking is a marketing person. You're right, Pepsi tastes better to you and no matter how Coke advertises you aren't going to switch (for me, it's the opposite, I prefer Coke, although I don't generally drink soft drinks). But taste is a psychological thing as well. Here's an example: have you ever taken a sip of something when you expected it to be something else? Maybe you were drinking Pepsi at a restaurant, but your waitperson gave you iced tea instead? That first taste is horrible because you were expecting Pepsi, but you got a completely different taste in your mouth.
Coke and Pepsi advertising are trying to get you to associate a particular taste with a feeling. Most people drink the soft drink that they're used to -- something they drank when they were young. It's the psychological aspect that the companies are trying to define for you.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
the DNS flurry of activity that occurs when one of those fucking ads pops up? Especially the X-10 ad. From I understand, it os some sort of Rube Godlberg load balancing thing to serve the ad from a server close to you. Essentially, you get 200-300 pings on your router's external interface port 53 in 1-3 sec per ad. Apparently, they take the lowest response time and serve from there. I run LRP and we discussed it on the mailing list a few months ago. I think you could view the threads from Geocrawler archives.
WTF? Over?
Be sure to check out...t s/configPolicy.html
(take out that space after component)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/componen
How do you disable window.open() for a specific domain ?
Saying that no one has found a way to make money on the Internet is like saying no one has found a way to make money on the telephone. You can't see the forest for the trees.
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
Omniweb (http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb/) for Mac OS X has and has had all of these features for a while now (except for maybe #3).
I think we can all agree on one thing: IE 6.0 Sucks
Try SmartHome.com. Lots of X10 stuff, no pop-up/pop-under ads or other obnoxious stuff. I've never ordered from them, but have been getting catalogs from them every few months for the last few years.
Amen.
There was some XML information related site that I stumbled into once that had pop-ups-the-wazoo.
My curiosity about XML technology was quickly quenched and I ventured elsewhere in a hurry.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
At 1600x1200 and X at 100 dpi, readably-sized anti-alised TrueType fonts in KDE/Konq look MUCH better than the bitmapped fonts or even scaled Type 1 fonts do. I once thought as you do -- that AA wasn't a big deal and as a Linux user, I could well do without it. But now, it's a real hardship when I have to use other non-AA browsers.
;-) Personally I think AA makes the text look blurred, washed out and harder to read. I guess it's different from system to system and person to person, so let's just be content with what we got :-)
Have you tried Microsoft or other commercial fonts? Many of them are free downloads (as in beer). I've yet to see good Free fonts.
Anyways, that you have to have resolution of 1600x1200, truetype fonts with anti-aliasing to enjoy reading the web is your problem isn't it?
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
hehe no I bought it all at once ... I drew up a scheme to do everything in my house and bought what I needed all at once ... thanks for playing though
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Hawkeye Motion Sensor: Detects motion about half of the time. Wall Switch Units: All of mine shorted out (yes, I can wire a wall switch) Compact Keychain remote: its huge! Remote Control+X10 sensor: Looses its code settings for the TV/VCR all the time. Firecracker Computer Controller: dosen't allow devices to pass thru like the website claims. Remote wall switch system (remote, lamp unit, reciever unit): every 1 out of 5 times the reciever dosen't catch the signal and you've gotta press it twice.
... not trolling, just my experiences.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
It does make sense for ISPs to provide their customers with "package" access to websites, though... free websites will definitely always be more popular, but how are they going to survive without a cash flow?
I've said this before here, I think: the problem is that the web is non-linear and, to a certain extent, mutable to each user (look at the programs that are out there to kill banner ads and pop-ups). You can't do that with a magazine or newspaper. TV is a linear stream, you can't skip ahead, so you're forced to suffer through an endless stream of car commericals and spots for the newest reality TV show. With newspapers, it's a bit different, but you still get big, glossy pictures every other page. The look and feel is different from browsing.
What to do? You can't do this pop-up crap, since it drives everyone bonkers. You shouldn't be doing flash ads as the intro to your site, since people are already waiting to download the page. Waiting for a flash animation will just irritate people more. (Who wants to wait longer to hear about Jim Beam?) People are used to getting their web content for free, so shifting to pay sites would be difficult at best (leaving aside people reposting material at free sites and whatnot).
My own personal view is that the web should be looked at as a gigantic public library. Largely, websites, especially news sites like cnn.com and the New York Times are reposting stories that they already have. These are materials that have already been created. Much like a library has copies of the daily news, so should the web. The drawback is that it's not free or even cheap to get a site up, running and maintained (as many readers probably know firsthand). So, do we put a tax on net access and use that to subsidize website creation, mitigating the need for ads? Or a central federal repository for information? I don't know...
One thing that seems to be happening is a kind of "mathematics of altruism," where someone creates a website and makes it publicly available with the expectation that a second person will create a different site of interest to the first, and so on. Of course, a majority of people don't have either web access or 1337 skillz to make a website. So the number of sites of interest is small at best, and those require lots of maintenence.
I certainly have no idea about the best way to go about this. I know that my gut tells me the web should be free.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue.
Well, if we whine and whine about it, they may continue to make popups more and more annoying. However, if we say nothing about them, they will surely make them more annoying.
Then again, they may only listen to those that vote with their wallets.
Isn't it about time for another DeCSS story?
kickin' science like no one else can,
my dick is twice as long as my attention span.
Withdrawal before climax is very ineffective and those who try this are usually called "parents."
The OmniWeb browser for OS X has that capability. The javascript preferences has an item "scripts are allowed to open new windows" with the choices of "always", "never", and "only in response to a link being clicked"
I'm so sick of people always saying that disabling JavaScript is the answer to disabling popup ads. Many websites require you to have JavaScript enabled to use them properly, and it's not a feasible solution to tell people to disable it.
Hell, while we're at it, let's just shun every technological advance that we can. Let's all use Lynx so we won't have to look at all those graphics. Or perhaps we could just telnet to the web servers and manually request pages. That would solve our popup problem once and for all now, wouldn't it?
If you love X10 gear, but hate X10's sales division, you should look at some of the X10 licensees. They produce X10 compatible gear, but either cheaper clone versions or extravagently expensive $100 wall switches.
You should check out SmartHome, an enormous home automation site I am not affilited with in any way, or X10 Pro, X10's slightly more serious professional division.
--
--
Keep NOSPAM to reply
Do we really need Slashdot to tell us this?
Hmmm.... I've been using lynx for years and have never see a popup with it.
Unfortunately, on Netscape 4.7x for Mac, the ads often don't pop to the back, and hitting Command-W (the close window key combo) closes the window with the content you wanted to see. Meanwhile, on my Windows machine at work, it's simply embarrasing to see a scantily-dressed spokesmodel promoting spy-camera use when I'm trying to read the Reuters feed on Yahoo!
I now use Guidescope on IE.
Works great, less hassle, very smooth way to get rid of ads and popups.
www.guidescope.com
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
So... why are we hearing the lament that banner ads don't work? Of course they work, if it increases name recognition it works. Period.
Banner ads that aren't clicked on are every bit as effective as news paper ads that don't send people rushing to the store.
Instead, the time will come when someone decides to buy something and they are trying to determine which brand to get, they will go with the one they know and love (or the cheapest depending on the person).
Instead of comparing banner ad click throughs to regular ads, they should be compared to coupons or something that is equivelant. If you put out a newspaper ad that says "call this number for more information" and you get X calls then that number of calls is what should be compared to the click throughs, not the number of sales made via that banner.
user_pref("capability.policy.default.Window.open", "noAccess");
The only problem with this, is that some people, like me, go to sites that use pop-up windows for things other than addverts.
Sure, you can add a the domain to a type of ignore list. But that's a pain. Quite often, I only visit a site once. So it's not worth it.
I think there needs to be an option that dissallows window.open when it is run automaticly. Not when the user clicks a link or button to start a function.
That would get rid of the pop-up adds, bit still alow pop-up windows to be used for sites that need them.
Zoot zoot zoot (Rebo and Zooty forever) Buy a StarFury today.
With the pop up ads you close the window and they are gone
unless of course when you close the pop-up add 50 billion more pop up.
who sez death can't be funny....www.endlesssorrow.com
have you actually watched free to air recently. It is really bad and most ads just insult your intelligence.
I would complain to yahoo - except I had to cancel my account when they would not agree to the Nader privacy letter.
I like NPR and the ABC (in Australia) - I guess I am in the minority here though.
I bought quite a bit of useful stuff in the past from them. It's too bad they had to blow all the money they got from me on popup ads.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
They have this page on their website. It makes a cookie so that the ads will be killed automaticly when they pop-under. (It only lasts 30 days though!)
You mean a little dialog pops up and asks you if you want the pop up?
Double the irritation.
Even more ironic is the page for this comic about pop ups having a pop up.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
So the desperate web sites made a mistake selling a more annoying ad for less, and no wonder X10 wanted to capitalize on it.
Not that anything would stop them. A couple of years ago I bought some X10 stuff from them directly (instead of via stores) and they started bombarding me with special offers at least once a day. Worse, every time I would write to get off, the mailing address I wrote from would get on the list, so soon I was getting 3-4 copies of their mailing each day. It took a while to get off, and of course I have not, and will not buy directly from X10 again.
And I used their 30 day disable flag for the pop-under.
They don't seem to be aware how hated it's made them to do both the mass mailings and the pop-unders, and sites selling them need to know too.
Of course, there are two sides to this. Those who like the "free" web realize that the failure of banner advertising is endangering it, and mass resistance to the other forms (stupid as they may be) and ad blockers will only assure their failure, and the eventual loss of the free web.
But I would rather pay for the content then get the linux pop-unders, which don't start on the bottom. I've noticed that in IE they are not so bothersome. Perhaps the ad sites should consider not providing them to linux netscape?
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
"I even decided to buy a Mazda instead of a Honda because the stupid "Who let the dogs out" commercial was annoying me to no end. Take that Honda." Have you seen the new Mazda commercials? Zoom Zoom Zoom! *background noise consisting of me cursing and trying to change the channel as fast as possible*
-- Judas96
"...don't take a nerf bat to a knife fight." - Joe Rogan, said on News Radio
> The problem is that no one has really found > a way to turn the web into a truly money- > making medium... Hey, I've got an idea! Since we've found something that really annoys potential customers, and yet doesn't really make us much money, let's see if we can REALLY annoy our potential customers. If they don't pay much for annoyance, they'll SURELY pay a LOT for REAL annoyance!
Can't wait to start seeing ads for this start to pop up...
So I read the yahoo article saying how annoying popup ads are...I close the article and up pops an ad. Unfortunately I have gotten so much practice lately I close them before I even see what company they are.
//m
It'd be helpful for the linux newbies if you'd post instructions *how* to go about disabling only the pop-x ads, not all Java/JS and not only on certain domains.
This
Oh yes..I was going to mention it, but it wasn't an X10 one, and it didn't come up for me on both computers, so it may be slightly random.
And I used to like Yahoo.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
One of my favorite sites for news and nicely displayed info (weather, stocks, news) was my.yahoo.com. Recently, Yahoo has been putting up these annoying pop-under ads on many news pages.
As much as I love the "free web", I fully understand the need for these web companies to feed their bottom line. Ads just aren't cutting it. Affiliate networks aren't cutting it. Face it, to get good content you simply have to pay for it. Or at least pay for a good share of it. I, for one, am quite willing to pay a yearly fee so I can get ad-free (or button ad only) service. Granted, I'm not full of money, so it has to be affordable. Say, $20. Sure, it can have a banner ad on each page, but only one (like Slashdot), and definately no popups.
I don't mind if Yahoo were to target their ads towards me, because good advertising can be just as useful as a good link or review (I can't tell you how many nifty Think Geek ads I have seen - if anyone who helped to make those happens to be reading - great job!). I'd rather they not keep each and every exact article I viewed and for how long, but a tally of sites is fine(for example, if it tallies how many tech and world news articles I've read vs. sports). Most importantly, my data cannot be sold, and I'd like to know as specifically as possible in their privacy policy what they do collect, and preferably for how long.
My problem is, I have found absolutely no way to express to Yahoo management that I desire this feature. Unlike most web sites, I simply cannot find a feedback feature for the web site in general or for My Yahoo!. If anyone could point this out to me, I'd be very happy to send off a feature-request e-mail.
On a related note, I'm off to try the Wall Street Journal Online Edition for 14 days. I've been a print subscriber for 3 years now, but I just let it cancel because it's expensive for non-students and generates a lot of paper. Instead, I'm going to try out the online version which includes all of the print articles plus other features for half the cost. They don't have to print and ship, I don't have to waste the paper and pay as much. This is why I love online content.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Tuesday's Foxtrot. Not updated yet on the official Foxtrot page.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
But I have to give this a chance. We all bitch and complain about the amount of ads that are on the net. Do you people realize that the net is one of the mediums that have the least amount of advertising? (w/ exception of Top100 sites / hardcore porn, which seem to be all advertising, and exactly the same - but I digress)
Newspapers are disgustingly filled with ads, I'm only 20 and I can barely read the news because it's stuck all the way in the top left of the page, waaay above the super big ads, and mind you, above my plate bowl as well, I have about 2.5 feet from nose to content, maybe more or less if you do the trigonometry etc.. but still all ads in between my plate and the content.
( I live in the portland, oregon area - meier and frank must own the newspaper- you want pics? - I'll send them to you, my email is on the top.)
Radio is disgusting, with the exceptions of "rebel" radio or Public broadcasting. Hell - TV is easily 1/4 advertising, a half hour show actually lasts around 20 minutes, and forget long movies, who have 15 minute commercial breaks near the end.
You can't ignore them either in most of these mediums - some newspaper ads easily take up 4/5ths of a page - or even 2 page spreads, tv and radio channels can be changed, but that's not much of a solution. Turning off the crap and inserting a CD is my typical way of dealing with it.
And think of how many ads you are innundated with when you go downtown.
Quit bitching about the net, we have it pretty good still. Pop ups are not as annoying as things are going to get.
Oh. side note. Has anyone with an ad blocker had trouble with cnn's page (video section)? Anybody know why?
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
As a marketing major who switched over to computers, one of the things I miss is that lack of quantification. It takes very little time now to figure out I screwed up. In marketing, it seemed like a "less than effective" marketing campaign could always be blamed on other things like salespeople or a downturn in the economy.
I wish I could blame my latest coding mistake on Bush's tax cut!
The perception of reality is more important than reality itself.
Just don't buy these products that use pop up advertisement. And while at it, boycott Abobe products, buying DVDs and everything with Microsoft or Apple in front of it, the end result is that you'll save money and live an healthy life.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
The mac is going to become the best computer to surf the web pretty soon. It doesn't support most 4th generation javascript sites so you can't get annoyed by these ads really. It doesn't support most ecommerce sites so you can't spend money online when you are ready to (big plus here, by the time you think twice you won't buy these gizmos anyway.) Finally if you reach a web site where you can finally see something bigger than in 4 points font it usually shows the text, IE or Netscape usually crash in the next 10 secs, forcing you to reboot your machine or better unplug it and go to play basketball outside. Not to mention that s' kiddies don't give a dam about infecting 3% of the marketshare. Not worse the effort, therefore little viruses on the machine. Now, I heard Apple is coming out with OS X and it's apparently worse as for Web user experience. Good!!! PPA
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Yep.. remind me to check your slashdor response after M$ introduces "Get access to all our M$ Passport Premium features for only 9.95$/mo" ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's so easy to make your page work with non-javascript enabled browsers, but very few sites do it.
--
TC - My Photos..
I think that it's going to be subscription based, just like television. But what you'll be paying for will be the ad-free version of websites.
So if you subscribe to the geek-package you'll get slashdot, userfriendly and MS-Knowlagebase (eh..) without ads.
All of this will be though your ISP, who'll offer you different free packages depending on how they are trying to profile themself in the marked ("Your family ISP - free access to Disney!").
The ads on sites you aren't paying for will probably get worse though...
There will still be free sites, that aren't there for the money. I never made any (real) money on any of my sites and I dont expect to.
And the quality of the free sites are rising, they are getting more and more content and the html is getting better and better (or maybe just less bad).
The real problem is that people don't know how to find these free sites. Portals and shops are designed to keep the user/customer on the site and they very seldom link to other sites even if they hold contents directly related.
--
TC - My Photos..
(Oddly enough, I *like* those commercials.)
Funny, they called you troll but I thought you had a good point.
Say anything pro-free software these days and you're guaranteed to be moderated down. I thought the moderation system was meant to be impartial. Just like women's lib, it's swung too far the wrong way. Shit, there goes my karma...
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
It's only double the irritation if you say yes :-)
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
For those who don't already know, Galeon can:
1. Disable pop-unders and pop-overs.
3. Open n related pages in one split window. (I presume this is the same as Galeon's "tabbed browsing" feature - perhaps it's not, but tabbed browsing is still very cool
4. Add bookmarks to specific folders/submenus.
5. Enjoy browsing the Web.
Galeon runs Mozillas rendering engine, Gecko, so the web looks just as good as it does in Mozilla, and all the netscape plugins work (although sometimes this can be an uphill struggle)
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
The dot coms are mostly going under these days. The only way for these companys to stay a float is to make banner ads that people really click on and buy there product.
The pop ups don't bother me becuase konquoer is nice enough to provide a disabler for it. The new ads that piss me off are the flash ones. I don't like checking out a site and hearing a long advertisment on xyz. I do have banner ad blockers via squid, becuase I _hate_ seeing those damn monkeys. Instead of punching the monkey, I would rather punch its creator. Plus, it saves me on bandwidth :)
I think the worst of the banner ads is still to come. Websites splash screens will soon be a 30 second ad before you can get to the site. Which will be VERY annoying. You watch, there on the way ...
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Ok, if they don't pop to the back, that would definitely bump them up in the suck factor.
But the scantily clad babe thing is a fringe benefit: you can now, in fact, browse any of the soft-core "E!-Network" brand of pseudo-porn and when caught, just claim "It was an X10 popunder ad!"
I'm surprised with how annoyed people are at popunder ads. I find it quite easy to ignore them. (And I don't even use Junkbuster or Mozilla's blocking feature; I just don't read 'em.)
To me, the ads are less annoying than the busy, animated, flashing ads I see all over the place, but I managed to train myself to ignore those ads, too. (And hey, look, there's one now at the top of this page, right now!)
Am I missing something here--why are people having such trouble coping with these things?
OSDN itself IS profitable. it is the whole of VA that is not.
-----
It also changed my Windows Media Player title bar to say "Windows Media Player Provided By X10 Media Player".
I checked out your screenshots and would bet that Microsoft would be interested to see them as well. I dont know of any skins available for Media Player (I havent read the licence either) but I would bet that they wouldn't look favorably upon another company rebranding their software.
M$ is obviously litigation-happy. Why don't we use it to our advantage for once?
--------
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Heh, Porn is worse than 5 or 6 popups. Foxsports, 1wrestling, espn have all had at one stage or another have had multiple popups. I don't surf for porn anymore, did that in the early 90's, :=)
Those of you around in those days will smile with the recollection on the net then.
" The best Bucket is a SCREAMING one "
I have no problems with just a single add or popup when visiting a site. However the sites with 3,4 or more popups every single damn page are the ones that I don't visit again. I mean you can't even SEE the site with freaking 4 or 5 adds, +the ones with no browser windows. Why would you do it? Is the question here whether pop-ups are bad full stop or should be limited?
" The best Bucket is a SCREAMING one "
I used to buy loads of X10 stuff and automated the hell out of my home, but with the current X10 popups in my face, I don't know if I want to buy from them again. Smarthome is a good alternative for your X10 needs and so much more. The patents are up on that tech, so plenty more companies are coming out with these devices and hopefully they all won't be spraying popups in our faces.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
Someone complained about my mentioning the WebWasher product before, but I have to bring it up here since it's right on topic. WebWasher is a program that's free for personal use and available for Linux as well as Windows. It gets rids of cookies and all the other cruft, but most important of all, I don't get sprayed in the face with popups when I use my browser.
The point is, if you avoid loading these ads, they become an ineffective method of advertising and as marketing sees decreased results from pouring money into them, they'll be less willing to use them. That, or they'll just increase the frequency of the pops so that other people will suffer. It doesn't matter to me because I don't see them and I'm not contributing to their revenue. In a sense, I wish that the banner market was still charging lots of $$$ for these so that they'd be wasting more money per ad campaign before realizing it was being filtered out.
TO be balanced with the non-commercial products, I understand that this filtering can also be done with Squid to be effective on a site-wide basis.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
What they should be using instead IS THIS. It's inside the original webpage, harmless as a regular banner, but so much more powerful.
Man, it's at times like this I wish I had mod points. ROFL. Sums the kid up in one.
You bring up a good point. You can't. It is easier to simply disable all javascript and then explicitly allow it on sites that you trust with that stuff.
I do not have a signature
There's too much irony in the whole situation. What is the world coming too???!?!
Bringing irony to the Slash-masses
I especially like the home security ads with the "home security bunny" supermodels on them. If you're like me, I'm sure you'll be getting one of these. Now I can monitor my home from work, so when the supermodels in evening wear try to break in again, I'll catch them red-handed.
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
If you go to the following http://www.x10.com/x10ads.htm, they will set a cookie for 30-day that disables the pop-under. Opt-out...
In particular, I'd like to only dissallow Window.open calls when they are hooked up to BODY's event handlers (mainly, ONLOAD, and ONUNLOAD, which are the main one's used to trigger those damn popups).
This wouldn't fix the problem though, because as soon as you do that, they'll just start putting the code in a regular JavaScript block on the page.
We need a way to disable window.open in any instance where it will be done without any action required. ONLOAD, ONUNLOAD, and any time it appears outside of a conditional block or function. I think that would do it?
"And like that
Ummm, no? I use many sites which require javascript for very valid purposes (mostly those which javascript was intended for). I'm more interested in stopping the occasional mis-use of it.
and stop visiting sites that have popups and popunders.
That is not a good solution. First of all, most of the sites that I run into with this are first-time sites that I've never seen before. You might as well say, "stop browsing the web." Secondly, some of the sites that use this are crucial to my work, or have content which I like to read. I'd rather just turn off their annoying ads. (I don't mind non-animated banner ads.)
When those sites start losing traffic to the plain html sites, maybe they'll stop filling the sites with so much crap.
Or when they start losing ad money because all of their ads are popups/unders instead of plain (non-annoying) banner ads, maybe they will switch back?
"And like that
Nah, because then they can just put the open command inside any link on the page. So when you go to the main New York Times page from your bookmarks, you don't get any bookmarks. But each link has an onClick="open X10 window", so each time you read a story it pops up a new window.
:)
Good point. However, I don't know how many sites would resort to this tactic. But if they did, I'm sure further changes could be made.
The only way to fix this is with Mozilla's solution -- block by site name.
That is a decent way of doing it, but it's not enough for me. It's flat-out impossible to block most of the pop-ups/unders I see that happen this way. That's because most of the ones I see are for sites I've never been to before, and probably never will see again.
I wish Mozilla was designed in such a way that people could write "security plugins," which others could download and install, without requiring an entirely different distribution of Moz...
"And like that
Coolness! Thanks! No more pop-ups in Mozilla!
Now, if they'll just get AA fonts (being worked on, apparently) and if 0.9.3 is introducing easy-add bookmarks (as another poster says), then Mozilla may finally be catching up to Konqueror! Probably I'll still use Konq, though. I have Mozilla 0.9.2 installed right now, and it's way slower...
Still, it's nice to know that the Linux browsers are making it easy to get rid of these damn popups. Some people here are complaining about another Slashdot rant on popups, but they drive me NUTS. Nothing pisses me off more than to close a maximized browser window, find 20 popups below it, and realize that people have been sucking my bandwidth for the last n hours and making money off me in the meantime.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Have to disagree on #'s 2 and 4.
At 1600x1200 and X at 100 dpi, readably-sized anti-alised TrueType fonts in KDE/Konq look MUCH better than the bitmapped fonts or even scaled Type 1 fonts do. I once thought as you do -- that AA wasn't a big deal and as a Linux user, I could well do without it. But now, it's a real hardship when I have to use other non-AA browsers.
On item #4... maybe I'm missing something (you're the second person to say that Mozilla does easy ads for some time now), but my 07/27 nightly does not have this feature, as far as I can see -- submenus do not have an add bookmark function at the top. What am I doing wrong?
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
In the Konqueror JavaScript preferences, check the "disable window.open()" option. That will disable pop-up ads for all domains.
The method in Mozilla has now been described here also (thanks to other posters).
Hope this helps.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Things to do with Konqueror that you can't do with the others, at least in Linux:
1. Disable pop-unders and pop-overs.
2. View the Web in anti-aliased fonts.
3. Open n related pages in one split window.
4. Add bookmarks to specific folders/submenus.
5. Enjoy browsing the Web.
If only Mozilla had come up with something so nice, more people would be using it now...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Block not just the advertisers but the sites that accept such advertising. When I see a pop-up (or under) ad appear, I send that site a message stating that I'm adding their domain to my hosts file pointing to 0.0.0.0 (and then that's exactly what I do). I offer them my email address and tell them that when the stop accepting pop-up and pop-under advertising to drop me a note because I'd be happy to remove them from my hosts file.
Unfortunately, I'm now blocking myself from some fairly decent sites, but that's the price they pay for using the same slimy advertising techniques as spammers, pornographers, and fortune tellers.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
even http!
by using gopher exclusively you can't possibly get hit by these things.
Got friends?
Yes! Somebody else hates that commercial!
I don't know what it is that creeps me out about that kid* but I hit the remote the instant those commercials come on.
* As opposed to X10 ads where at least I know exactly what's so creepy about them. As another Konqueror user, though, I don't have to deal with them.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I think popunder ads are more annoying. Window focus leaves that of the originating window, the window pops up and then *poof* disappears to the bottom. Closing the window (in win2k) makes the originating window blink wildly for attention in the taskbar.
Seriously though...I don't know what it is about him but man that kid's creepy. *shudder*
And the "Zoom Zoom" kid is an improvement? ;)
So I tried to OPT out of the x10.com ads. You know, through their website. I did it multiple times. The first time I visited a website that had an X10 ad It tried to display it, detected the cookie, and directed me to a different ad instead.
I tried opting out again reccently. Now instead of receiving the tiny ads, I receive big HALF PAGE ads.
*sigh*
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
When the person ultimately in charge of something as big as Slashdot, who undoubtedly normally has to remain neutral for advertising sales purposes comes out and TRASHES a company, you know he's pissed...
*grin*
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
People might not be filtering them out if they weren't all friggin' ANIMATED!!!!
I really don't mind a little space at the top of the browser for a small ad. The animation, however, drove me to filter it.
Now that I'm using mozilla and can display the image but kill its animation, I don't filter them anymore. I may even be inclined to click on interesting ones now.
Kill the animation, and maybe people wouldn't need to kill your ad!
Look. I posted that when I really should have been heading off to bed. It turned into a huge rambling nonsensical paragraph that should have never been.
Maybe if I slept more, my posts would make more sense and be based on logic.
Yes, I think we are all very tired of the countless "X10" camera ads that seem to be popping up everywhere. I can't take a stroll through anywhere in my company without seeing some poor sap whose closing those ads. But the problem really isn't the pop-up ads. The problem is that no one has really found a way to turn the web into a truly money-making medium... except for those selling porn of course. In the absence of real profits, the marketing geniuses of the world turn toward the one thing that they know: selling advertising time and space. And the reality is, this isn't that bad. Like many Americans, I watch my share of television. I have of watching the good old broadcast stations (NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, etc.), but I choose to pay for access to other channels via cable. I do not, however, pay for premium channels like HBO, Showtime or Playboy. That is my choice. And here is where it gets scary for the internet... we are headed toward the same direction. In the near future, the Internet is going to be segmented according to what content you are willing to pay for. Using AOL/Time Warner? You get access to what they want you to see. If you want more, you have to pay outside interests. Meanwhile, your buddy down the street is using @home and the two of you are lucky just to be able to email each other. You won't be able to game against each other or IRC together of anything because you will each be seperated by various firewalls that the service providers and content providers will have in place to make sure you pay your dues. And the "free" sites on the internet will be few and seldom used. They won't have the same glitz that the big sites will have. Now, I realize that I am tired. Looking over my rant, I'm not sure if any of it made any sense... and there ain't a drop of caffiene in the house. Hopefully, it will interest someone and add to the discussion, otherwise just mod me down. Karma is at 50... 45... 30... Warning Karma level is dropping rapidly, please change your rate of descent. 25... 20... 10...
I'll second Webwasher as one of the best pieces of anti-junk ever to hit the Web. I prefer a paid competitor called AdSubtract personally (I think it's about $30, but I like its interface a bit better). Either will rid you of pop ups, pop-unders, ads in general and all sorts of other shyte (including JavaScript and referrers) on a general basis or site-specific. I can't recommend either product strongly enough.
Add a great little freebie app called Ad Aware to that list, which tells you if some spyware has made it through your defenses, and gives you the option of cleaning it off your system.
Using the Web is actually a pleasant experience with these wondrous little apps.
Cheers, PJ Dougherty
Proxomitron gives (almost) full control to you and is much fun. Replacing ads from spamspamspam.com by a nice "[spamspamspam sucks]" message makes you smile and saves bandwidth by not downloading their crappy images. :-) and send to the Proximitron site to share with others.
Hate a new popup provider ? Just hack a small filter regexp to find (and replace by "This banner killed by Proximitron"
Recommended !
In addition turn off scripting and active content - we want information, not flashing and beeping nonsense eating up bandwidth.
The original concept of a banner ad is not all that bad; most people accept them as the cost of viewing the content. Unfortunately, we all ignore the ads because they are seldom tailored to our interests. After I see 1000 or so totally irrelevant ads, I am going to ignore that stupid box at the top of the screen.
The advertisers are trying to track our preferences, but they are not very good at it. When they collect preference data, they sell "targeted" ads at a premium. This makes "untargeted" a relative bargain. It's cheaper to blast out the message to millions of people instead of looking for the subset of the population that actually wants "Herbal Viagara" -- ask any spammer. Contributing to the problem is the marketing mentality "Our target market is the person who doesn't even know they need Herbal Viagara! Anyone who hasn't opted-out in the past 30 days is a potential customer! How do the customers know they don't want it until we tell them about it?"
IMHO, making the banner ads work would require precise targeting, based on the customer's preferences. Unfortunately, this will never happen. As an end user, I assume the marketing industry is looking for more ways to harrass me with obnoxious tactics. Therefore, I do everything in my power to conceal the data that might identify my preferences. After all, I want to avoid telemarketing, spam, and fraud. Since I do not control the data after I release it, my best bet is to supply only the most basic of information, and only when I am prepared to defeat the endless marketing. Ask for my e-mail address? Fine, here is a [quota exceeded] throwaway account. Want my home address? OK, your junk mail will be tossed in the order in which it was received. Want my home phone number? OK, but I'm on the state DNC list; $5,000 fine per violation. Put some crap on my screen? Click-close-byebye. Want to know if I have a lawnmower and if so, what brand? Sorry, data unavailable.
The marketers big mistake is the erroneous assumption that the ad viewer's time is unlimited and free. Ultimately, there is a maximum amount of time any of us will tolerate advertising, and a lesser amount of time where we actually pay attention. I think we're it has become a zero-sum game. As more ads are sold, the audience for each is shrinking. Worse, the audience is pre-conditioned to ignore the ads and defend against obnoxious marketing tactics.
With appropriate technology and business practices, the highly-targeted banner ad would be a sensible part of a profitable/enjoyable web experience. Too bad the marketing industry is so clueless.
"You must make sure you have your cookies enabled, for this link will give your computer a cookie that will disallow X10 pop-under ads from appearing on your computer as you "surf" the Internet.
This seems a bit too mystical to me... This magical cookie your computer can eat to make all your pop-under X10 ads disappear! Does it go in the cup holder tray, or the knife sharpener slot?
Also notice the use of quotes around the word surf... Because no one really knows what that might be yet, right??
This is my Sig.
Create a perl proxy to filter the ads and popup code. Randal Schwartz published some examples in WebMethods some time back. There was also a suggested solution for Mozilla in 1998: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=perl+popups+prox y&hl=en&safe=off&rnum=2&selm=19980911103828-camero n-1-21032%40sid.research.canon.com.au
Ask me about my vow of silence!
I wondered when current TV personality Conan O'Brien would start posting on slashdot.
Where's the "Konqueror" selection?
" I uninstalled the software but this still didn't solve the problem. So I called the company and they said this is all in the license agreement. Well, I sent their product back and got my refund and used a registry editor to painfully remove all of the X10 brandings and subliminal messages."
Good fucking lord. What COMPLETE assholes! This is an example of what happens when marketers are allowed to run things.
So you can't buy and use their product without agreeing to an EULA that lets them turn your PC into a billboard for them? Do these idiots REALLY think that these kind of fascist marketing techniques work?
I hope not... I was actually thinking about buying a couple of their products, as they DO sell some cool gadgets, but not now. No way.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
I have to run Windows for some things, like, emm, Visual Studio for my work. The software for the product was also only supported under Windows. In any case, it's still bad form.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I visited the X10 site and bought the Remote DVD package. The product is good, but the marketing this company uses is down right ruthless and in some cases counter-productive toward customers.
Upon installing the support software, X10 overwrote all my shortcut icons (the little arrow which appears on all icons) with a tiny X-10 logo. It also changed my Windows Media Player title bar to say "Windows Media Player Provided By X10 Media Player". Also before previewing any movie files there is an X10 logo in the video, right before it begins playing.
And if that wasn't enough, they put their logo in the General section of System Properties, such as OEMs do. And yes, my bookmarks in both Navigatior and IE have all kinds of X10 links.
I uninstalled the software but this still didn't solve the problem. So I called the company and they said this is all in the license agreement. Well, I sent their product back and got my refund and used a registry editor to painfully remove all of the X10 brandings and subliminal messages.
It really makes me mad when a company thinks they have the right to mess with your system. And no, they haven't stopped e-mailing me promotional stuff even after I unsubscribed (didn't know I ever actual subscribed in the first place) from their mailing lists. I am also starting to get stuff in the mail now too.
For some pictures of the brandings, see:
http://root.27south.com/x10.html
I will never buy an X10 product again. Just shows how advertising can actually be bad.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I purchased a standard AdultCheck account once. Not the gold one, mind you. It's a fucking scam. I actually did an objective test, and out of 50 sites, 50 of them were teaser sites that gave you three pictures and THEN, oh wait! do you want the real porn in the VIP section? just buy the ADULTCHECK GOLD! I swear to god, it was so ridiculous. Very underhanded. I demanded my money back and got it. Of course, that was when i cared about porn.
Hey Taco! Looks like you're using the "infinite monkeys and typewriters" scheme to generate Ask Slashdots again...
Everyone knows that that is waht pron is all about. When you say "I get too may pops," you are saying, "I'm addicted to pr0n!!!! Look over here!!!! PERVERT OVER HERE!!!" >>
There are also some ad-supported sites I visit regularly and want to support, whose ads I don't mind seeing.
Now, I don't work for any ad-blocking company, and I've tried several products (as I said). However, my current blocker seems to work pretty well. I'm currently using AdSubtract, from adsubtract.com. After using it for a few months and occasionally trawling my cookies for more customization, I've been browsing with almost exactly the right amount of popups--ones that I WANT to see!
Sort of like Adult Check for pornographic sites? Now that's a model that does generate revenue. Whether it will do so for mainstream content, however...?
-j
Torg, come out of the spaceship. Nothing can stop Torg.
Either browse with irritating ads for free, or visit the same site minus the ads, provided you end up paying the same as the site would have made from showing you the ads?
In fact, why don't we get adserver to manage this? if you have a cookie (or whatever) then when a site links to an ad, it'll be ignored or replaced by a 1pix gif for the same charge?
Let the people decide!
If you can't see this, click here to enable sigs.
I live the Flash ads that C-Net has. They are tasteful and not unecessarily annoying. I GAURENTEE I give far less notice to popup ads than banner ads. Most of the time, I "acidentally notice/read" banner ads while reading the site content, but popus get closed like clockwork, most of the time before the window content even loads. Plus, annoying me doesn't necessarily make me want to buy your product. We need ads to keep the Internet cheap, however, there are good ways and there are bad ways to do it...
Why are we referred to as consumers? I'm on the net usually to play games (the free ones, not the ones charging monthly fees), research info on Linux, my car (Club DSM), discussion boards about tech and computers, Online Banking and Payments, and many other websites that I'm not paying squat for. As soon as sites start charging for content (be it thru annoying pop-under ads, or actual monthly fees) I'm quite likely to leave and find a better free site. That's what got everyone online so quickly in the first place. It was absolutely free! Do I buy stuff online? Sure, but it's definitely a VERY small percentage of my total yearly monetary expenses. Online businesses had better realize this fast if they want to stay in business.
It's not that charging for services is bad. In fact, more power to them. But unless your service is absolutely necessary to a web surfer, you'd better kiss your profits goodbye. And no, showing more banner ads and pop-unders will not increase revenues if no one is willing to visit your site in the first place. Plus, with all the free software out there that allows everyone to filter out the 'noise', businesses had better find a better way to attract and keep customers than just flashy ads.
--
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Yeah. I think so. At least it's not as intrusive to my ears as that f***king dogs song.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Mazda is partly owned by Ford and in direct competition with Honda. Hope this helps.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
If I owned any YHOO stock I'd sell right away. This will just turn people away from the website. I can't remember if I ever bought anything where advertising annoyed the hell out of me. In fact I remember many times making a concious decision of NOT buying things that are marketed with annoying commercials. I even decided to buy a Mazda instead of a Honda because the stupid "Who let the dogs out" commercial was annoying me to no end. Take that Honda.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
Shit continues to smell bad.
Every once in a while, though, I'll be reading an informative and interesting site, and a big huge flash advertisement will pop up right in front of my surfing material. I stop rationalising. It is times like these that a tremendous urge overtakes me. It is an urge to seek out and find, wherever they may be, the advertising execs who came up with such an idea, perhaps they'll be watching a movie, or reading the newspaper on a park bench. It is at just such a time that, I think to myself, I will sneak up behind them and, at whatever moment is most inconvenient, place a large, obnoxious poster for my employer between them and the medium they are currently enjoying. If I catch them in a particularly private bout of reading, burried deep in an article of Hustler or Playboy, for this medium I will place in front of them many posters at once, obstructing, sometimes, their entire view. Every time they get rid of one such ad, I will bring three or four more up to take its place. EVENTUALLY THEY WILL HAVE TO CRASH PLAYBOY AND REBOOT THEIR READING SESSION JUST TO GET RID OF ALL THE FRIGGING...but I've let myself get a little carried away...no matter. Revenge...will...come.
Look at this from an Advertisers perspective. The pay money for ads (like ThinkGeek with Slashdot), but very few probably act on those ads, let alone notice them.
:p
POP-UPS (or pop-unders) get attention. No publicity is bad publicity. For every person who boycotts X10 because of this, some poor schmuck is going to go out and buy a cheap wireless camera (for who knows what), and they'll at least do better than they'd do with a 468x60 ad at the top of the page.
They just want their ads to get noticed, that's all. Yeah, they piss me off to, and I close them, but I can see why they'd try this.
Maybe the truth is the fact that advertising rarely works as well as they think it does. Think Pepsi made back the tens of millions they spent on that Britney Spears/Bob Dole ad in increased sales DIRECTLY RELATED to that ad (and the ads FOR the ad)? Hell no.
Ads don't work as people think. Coke can spend billions of dollars a year, and I'll still drink Pepsi. And that has nothing to do with Pepsi's ads either. Just like the taste better. People will stick with two things. Best quality (in THEIR opinion), or cheapest. I know plenty of people who drink crap like "Adirondack Cola", which tastes like CRAP, but is DAMN cheap, and they live by it.
If you don't like popups then DON'T ever visit those sites again! They don't have to waste their time, bandwidth, management, cpu cycles, nor ram to support your leeching, and you don't have to put up with any of their annoying ads. Now how fair is that?
So instead of trying to find ways to cheat them and leech leech leech, just say "no".
And stop blaming x10. If it weren't for yahoo, msn, and a bunch of other sites that allowed for this type of advertising, you wouldn't get ANY of these popups and popunders. So get mad at yahoo, msn, hotmail, etc.. and stop going there forever and ever. Add that to your hosts file if it'll make you happy:
yahoo.com 127.0.0.1
Deal???
Or are you going to let your personal selfishness get the best of you? You know, that attitude where you don't give a crap about anybody but yourself, make 'em pay as much as possible while YOU pay zero gratitude in return, make up any excuse to justify your personal greed, that spoiled "I deserve everything for nothing" thinking...
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
"If you go to the following http://www.x10.com/x10ads.htm, they will set a cookie for 30-day that disables the pop-under. Opt-out..."
Opt out? Sure, but only for 30 days. BFD.
To quote Douglas wrt X10:
"They are a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes."
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Even visiting the story triggered a @!#$ing pop-up....
A friend of mine just turned me onto a program at http://www.webwasher.com/ (no, I don't work for them). Though I've yet to install it, it claims to filter this sort of thing out (also banner ads and more from the looks of it). Haven't read the liscense in any detail, but the site claims that the software is "free for home and educational use". Linux, Windows, and Mac OS versions available (w/english and german versions). I was waiting on said friend to use it a few days and give me some feedback, but I'll gladly let you guys be the guinea pigs ;)
Like the title says...
People say they hate ads on the web.
People use all manner of software to stop ads appearing on their favourite sites.
The sites stop getting any revenue from the advertisers, as no-one is viewing their ads.
The site stops being able to afford to run its service.
The site either goes under, or starts trying to charge for access to its site. (And we've all seen how effective that is)
What are the alternatives?
Banner ads? (Which we all seem to accept, here they are on Slashdot...) Nope, they get sweet bugger all response, so cannot make the types of money sites need to survive.
No advertising... so then how does the site pay for hosting and employees? Then we're left with only commercial companies and those big, bad multinationals with enough money from offline ventures to pay for their websites. We start loosing any kind of unbiased editorial on the web then...
So, it would seem we have to have advertising (It pays for your Free to air TV)... so why not improve it and at least have it targeted? I think what pisses people off more than anything is adverts for stuff they have no interest in at all... but a well targeted offer, delivered when you're interested in such a product, can actually be a helpful thing...
Just food for thought. (Albeit low calarie)
Really folks, the only way to stop these people from their ruthless marketing techniques of not only popping up ads every 2 second when you're browsing the net but also taking over your computer when you install their software is to simply NOT go to their website. Don't ever go there, don't buy anything from them, tell all of your friends how evil they are. Spread the word, don't let them do any business, and they will cease to exist. Of course, someone else will probably come along doing the same thing...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~ now you know
Works on Linux, Windows, Mac. Works with any broswer that supports proxys. Stops all forms of HTML evil. (Well they COULD add a custom filter option, but they've done a bang-up job of catching everything that drove me nuts already) No more Popups, window resizes, launching of scripts on program exit, banner ads, cookie management. Dozens of other filters. FREE for personal use! WebWasher
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
And money still rules the world!
Don't worry. I'm too busy [to}every]day
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
In some ways they are better than those annoying, moving, eye catching ads that we see around. For instance, the one on this web page http://www.canada.com/shopping/ which actually moves in front of the text you might be trying to read. With the pop up ads you close the window and they are gone. With these annoying eye catching ones they just distract the content you are trying to read and in some cases obstruct it.
If consumers weren't such dopes this type of advertising wouldn't be so effective. I don't read the damn things, I refuse to. If enough people had this same attitude about pop-ups/unders than we wouldn't have to live with them because companies'd have to figure out some other way to advertise.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
Did you know that recording marketing studies popup-advertising is the most efficient way to get people buy your product. Second most effective are (flash) animations.
Pop Up Advertising Continues to Suck
Whew.. for a minute there I was starting to think popups were a Good Thing. Thanks for steering me back on the path.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Thank you for contacting us with your concerns. These ads are opened when you visit a site that we have an advertising relationship with and they do not track you personally. We advertise on many popular web sites; any of the sites you visit regularly might run our ads. Because of the way the ads work, you should only see them once a day from each of the sites they are on. You can remove yourself from our pop-under advertising by following the instructions at the bottom of this page: http://www.x10.com/x10ads.htm If you follow these instructions, a cookie will be placed on your PC that tells us not to display the ads to you.
________________________________________________
Those nice folks at hotmail have come up with a new one that I have yet to figure out how to disable: Display the banner ad, connect to the server to display your inbox, and then wait for a few seconds before proceeding. Your browser is locked up waiting for a reply from the server. There's nothing you can do.
Sigh.
Why are all these ads so tacky? Doesn't anybody with any class advertise on the Internet?
...laura
hello!! there is an easy to way disable ALL and EVERY pop- ads... Disable JAVASCRIPT in your browser and be done wiht it. Now If i only could login into /. without having to enabel cookies, then my life would be perfect...
just my $0.02