Slashdot Mirror
Pop-Up Ads Begin To Face Serious Opposition
guttentag writes "The New York Times is running an article that looks at the ways AOL is trying to reinvent itself. Apparently, as customers began terminating their accounts and revenue dropped, AOL tried to make up the lost revenue by increasing the frequency of its popup ads. But the level of consumer satisfaction just seemed to plummet, so AOL's president formed a task force to study the problem. It found that focus group satisfaction went up "notably" when the number of popups was cut in half. As a result, AOL has scaled back (but not eliminated) the popups and it says this has been a catalyst for revolution within the company." Combine this with the recent announcement from iVillage and who knows - maybe more content providers will see the light - the light that readers don't like to be forcibly diverted from what they are doing.
What? You didn't think I was serious?
So... pop-up ads aren't annoying? Why didn't somebody say this before I bought all that usefull stuff?
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Of marketers? As one may have predicted, la montagne a accouché d'une souris...
Wait.. You're saying people that pay AOL a monthly fee are seeing POPUPS? What the hell? POPUPS were invented for NONPROFIT sites to stay alive, not for corporate whoring!
pop up ad make mad
customers wont spend money
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
A guy linked to his rant here related to the iVillage thing, and I think he hit it on the head: When the average person finds the internet just a frustration, the potential revenue for everyone involved will eventually suffer. Companies like AOL have to do this for long term survival.
Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?
Regardless of how annoyed people get with pop-ups, I think that we all need to note that while AOL did cut the amount of pop-ups in half...they are still using pop-ups. Pop-ups, whether we like it or not, are an effective advertising medium that are here to stay.
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
... they would have found that 73% prefer to have pop-up ads without AoL.
--- What?
And in another groundbreaking discovery today (paid for by a $92Million Government Grant) a study team has discovered that:
The Grass *is* Greener on the Other Side
The amount of dark is inversly proportional to the amount of light, and tends to be reduced when the sun is up
And that if she's a witch, she'll weigh the same as a duck.
- Jones
I assert that my comment is only my opinion, not that of any employer, past, present or future.
As a one time free registration on NYT. :)
I must have more NYT accounts then I do e-mail.
It's too bad to see AOL caving to this kind of pressure, which is one step away from piracy. We're all comfortable with advertising, whether on billboards, the sides of busses, the Slashdot PT Cruiser, television or radio. Viewing advertisements is half of an implicit contract that allows you to enjoy free or inexpensive services. AOL users who complain about pop-ups or, worse, try to subvert the advertisements' technology, are ruining the Internet for everyone. They should be treated like the hackers they are and banned from the Internet before it's too late.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
But what I do get annoyed with are pop-up ads that pop-up new ads when you close them, pages that automatically ask you if you want to install "useful" spyware, and pop-up generators. Another sort of ad that I've just started seeing proliferate are the ones that pop up in their own window that doesn't seem to be a browser window, no status bar, no scroll bar, no file/edit/etc, no max/min/close. The only way I've found to close these is by ctrl-alt-del'ing (sorry I use W2K :) ).
It's a good thing companies are getting wise to how annoying these are though. Good stuff...
sig.
iVillage said they would no longer us pop-up ads, instead they would use pop-under ads. AOL is likely to do the same. AOL already disables the function to supress pop up windows in Netscape. They need those ads for revenue. So I really don't see them being serious about eliminating pop-up ads or some form of "invasive ads". I'll continue to use Opera and Mozilla, where I the user am given a choice on what is forced down my throat and what isn't.
I am Lord Snowbeam. Heed my call!
Wow, I almost had forgotten about popups. Every system I deal with has Mozilla loaded, and unrequested popups are not allowed. Nor are "open in new window" links, those drive me nuts. If I want it open in a new tab, I'll middle click it.
:-)
Glad they are getting the message though. Back when I did use a browser that wouldn't kill them on it's own, I always just closed them without looking anyhow. I could care less what was being advertised. Just as I instantly crumple all papers left on my windshield instead of giving them one minute second of my attention (Unless it says TICKET of course
Funny.
Go Mozilla, you're great!
Go Proxomitron, you edit the Internet.
Seriously. I wish Advertisers use pop-up ads, atleast we know how to kill them. If they find that pop-up/under is not working, they will come up with new ways to be intrusive, Like showing a full-page ad before directing to the actual page we clicked. Ads taking 90% of the page, so that we have to click 10 "next" pages just to read a small article.
Its like "You sing so well, You should be on radio(atleast I can switch channels) situation
Cheers,
Roshan
Use Mozilla with its popup disabling preference. Apart from tabbed browsing, standards compliance, yadda yadda yadda, this is a huge huge benefit that IE doesn't have.
-- Azaroth
This news is completely inconsistent with my own experience. Until about a week or two ago I never saw a popup when I started up AOL IM. The app does launch a little browser window next to the IM client, but it's mostly content, not ads. Now all of a sudden I get this annoying avatar chick peddling "CokeMusic.com" every single time I start IM. To make matters worse, she also speaks. It's basically a commercial pushed to my box and I hate it. Do you suppose I will ever convince my grandmother to switch to UNIX talk?
They actually needed to commission a 'task force' to figure this out? I mean, for christ sakes, I can tell you the things that piss people off the most online *right now* for free, no research required: 1. Spam 2. Popup Ads Yes, off the top of my head I came up with those 2 stunning conclusions. Seriously, I often wonder if the employees these companies have their own brains or if they get 'CorpOS: Dumb Terminal' installed as soon as they arrive. Coming in loud and clear Captain Obvious, sir!
"What can a thoughtful man hope for mankind on Earth, given the experience of the past million years? Nothing." -Bokonon
So I wonder if AOL will do a focus group to figure out if cooking their books creates investor dissatisfaction.
I recently read an article that described AOL's concern for the customer experience as "Soviet". I think that bashing the Reds this way is kind of unfair.
Has anyone ever looked into the effectiveness op pop-up advertisements? Is there any company that can say 'my revenues were up X% since we started advertising through pop-ups?'
Same probably goes for spam. Are there any figures that show the effectiveness of spamming?
Maybe this is just too straightforward thinking, but how many time can you spend 1 dollar? In my opinion: Just Once. With all the budget in the world, you can't make me spend money I don't have.
Still billions of dollars are being spent on advertisements that try just that. Isn't it time someone got a clue?
Until you get more subscription/donation sites going, you'll see advertising. It may not take the form of pop ups or banners, but you will see more interstials and text ads. Others will doubtless come along.
Some sites have begun fighting back against anti-popup software. There is now anti-anti-ad software. A good example of this script is here.
"You're getting brutal, Sark. Brutal and needlessly sadistic."
"Thank you, Master Control"
-Sark and the MCP
Has anyone really tried to determine how effective junk snail mail is? I have a hard time believing that there is much return on investment for junk snail mail.
Another form of advertising that sucks is adverts for popcorn and coke at a movie theatre. Why do they do that? How effective could it possibly be? The appearance of adverts indicates that the movie is about to start and you ought to sit down to catch the show that you just paid a rather hefty price for. Has anyone done the simple social experiment of determing the return on investment? Is it simply Coca Cola Inc paying a hefty advertising fee to the Movie chains that fuels it? When will they stop? Has anyone noticed that they used to run shorts like the lone ranger or superman or documentaries? Has anyone else noticed that in certain art movie houses they re-run those old pre-feature items for the nostalgia? Wouldn't small production film crews better spend their time on documentaries rather than expensive Coke ads?
Pop ups always annoyed me, but I had accepted them as a part of the online browsing experience. Well, then I installed Mozilla and started blocking them. I was amazed how how much more pleasant browsing was. Even worse, when I would go back and use IE for certain things, I was amazed at how horrible those pop ups really were. The hatred was strong.
On another note, advertisers should try a bit harder with their ads. I'm amazed at how well thought out the ads for Absolute Vodka are. They're very engaging and the ONLY flash ads I've ever interacted with. We could use a few more like them, and less SHOOT THE MONKEY types.
DUH!!! it took AOL a task force to figure this out??? AOL must be run by the stupidest lamers the world has ever known...
This is not good. Once the advertising companies realise that people find the ads an annoyance, they'll stop paying for them. And if they're not paying, I'll have to.
I'd much prefer a free web and popup-killer apps to paying for anything.
I am a Karma Library.
Just use mozilla. ;)
There's a big difference between focusing attention to send a message and getting somebody to look somewhere and close a window. I don't think most advertisers online are smart enough to be able to know the difference.
I think NON-INTRUSIVE interactive content in ads is going to be the savior of online advertising in the future, and I think pop-ups have decimated what could have been (in my opinion anyway).
-- The unsig...
when i downloaded and tried netscape 7.0 pr1, i kind of guessed that aol's hand was involved in taking the "allow web pages to open unrequested windows" option out of the gui that's in mozilla (although it's still possible by editing pref.js). but this piece confirms it.
Way back when I saw the only definition of marketing that I can respect.
"Find out what users want and give it to them"
I like this better than
"Find out what makes us most money and look for ways to con users into accepting it"
Sounds like AOL are waking up to this too.
I let my nephew use my sole remaining Windows machine a few weeks ago while he was over for the weekend. I went downstairs to use it and low and behold every web page I went to previously now was barraged by pop-up and pop-under ads.
Sure, I was at first amazed that I could lower my mortgage rates, increase my sexual hunger, and check out hot teen action, but then I realized that I wasn't even browsing pRon sites, and I was still getting that sort of sheer amount of ads.
Digging a little further into it and after checking out the history on the userid I had created for him I found that the nephew likes pRon, and lots of it. He also apparently deemed it necesary to install a bunch of shady software off the net while using my computer, particularly Kazaa.
I proceeded to remove any and all software that wasn't there before he used the computer. After rebooting, low and behold the pop-up ads were still popping up like zits on a teenager's face, marring my desktop with their ugly little existence. Now was the time for definite action, no time to hessitate.
After searching about a bit I recalled Ad-Aware and promptly downloaded and installed it. After running a full scan with this software and rebooting, there was no more pop-up ads. Sure, I may not be able to lower my mortgage rate anymore, but at least I'm not annoyed by 5 pop-up ads every time I open slashdot's homepage.
As for my nephew, he'll no longer be using any of my computers anymore. His taste in pRon was just plain horrid anyways. Not even one good free site did he find.
Duris MUD - The best pkill MUD. Ever.
I'm amazed at the resistance I get... I think it's time to start the 'campaign to disable javascript everywhere'. Javascript is EVIL. It's like a C++ compiler on your local machine, accessible to anyone who's sites you visit. The only thing they've done is remove those functions that outright allow damage to be done. But every day, another insecure javascript feature is found, just recently Internet Explorer and Opera were found vulnerable to the same javscript bug. What does it take to convince people? If you disable javascript, you will not longer have popup ads, no more cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, no more security exploits (we've been lucky that nobody really attempts tp exploit them, we talk about windows boxes having exploits, but all machines are vulnerable to javascript), and more. So please, disable javascript. You can still use almost all sites without it. It will make you more secure, and have a much happier browsing experience.
I would rather a pop-up ad any day of the week. I can always close them with a click of the mouse. But those damn CD cases ruined my latest issue of Time Magazine, so I completely missed out on the hype being generated by Bruce Springsteen cashing in on the deaths of 2,832 people with his latest CD and how wonderful of a human being he is, according to the editors of Time. Because of Steve Case and his God damn CDs, I missed on loving 'The Boss' even more.
Damn!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
... when finally taking over the position as CEO of a major dotcom, become incredibly stupid and greedy. In addition, force customers to be constantly harassed by countless advertisments via potentially annoying pop-up ads - technology makes things easier. Also don't forget to really believe that people really want to see ads and buy the junk (stuff) that our advertiziers are selling. Remember, people are sheep and they can be herded like them. You're a CEO and you're above those little people.
Additional note to self: Continue to find ways to prevent other tech companies from interacting with our tech so we can mantain our monopoly over the masses.
popup ads, popunder ads, UCE, and telemarketers all rate the same with me: number ONE with a bullet... .45ACP, that is.
don't call me, don't spam my mailbox, and don't plaster your crude, marketing-unsavvy, advertisements on my monitor screen!!! Period. End of story.
-PONA-
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
AOL has crafted a special pop-up ad to let you know of their new commitment to customer satisfaction!
And the really funny part is that IE will never have it! Microsoft will never screw over its fellow biznizes by giving users control over their computers.
- Have a picture
...that the referenced article is from one of the very few places whose popups aren't blocked by Mozilla's popup killer.
The rogue modules are at this moment trying to send tarred copies of the servers' filesystems to various *.no domains associated with the notorious elderly hacker group DIAPERS. Based on logfile analysis up to this point, apparently DIAPERS is primarily interested in email and personal documents relating to unreported security-related bugs in Apache 2.0.
The Apache Group -- led by Sven Fijlmijup of Apache Europe -- are currently trying to learn as much as possible about the attack to increase the chances that INTERPOL will be able to find and arrest the responsible elderly. Afterwards, all Apache.org websites will but SHUT DOWN until tomorrow at 8:00AM GMT, at which time a single newly-installed server will be deployed and the Apache USA group will post more information about the attack. NOTE THAT AT THIS MOMENT IT APPEARS THE PRIMARY CVS SERVERS WERE ISOLATED FROM THE ATTACK. Apache AustralAsia has taken reponsibilty for diffing the CVS repository against secure backups and Apache Canada will be joining them later this week to ensure that the Apache source code itself has not been compromised.
So please do not be alarmed but PLEASE DO NOT VISIT APACHE.ORG as their bandwidth is effectively hosed by the reverse-DDOS. All that is accessible is a hacked index page that contains a shoutout to various DIAPER hackers. I have reproduced the shoutout here so that you have no possible reason to visit Apache.org and further murder their bandwidth.
Thank you for your time.-- The_Messenger
Apache Russia
AOL decreasing their own use of popup ads on their existing clients is not going to lead to your typical online advertiser curbing their own use of them. AOL is attempting to retain their clients. In order to do this, they're looking for ways to stop pissing them off. Good idea. Genius.
It's not like that for your typical online advertisers. They're generally trying to acquire new business. They want to get noticed, and if they're the kind to use popups or popunders, they're generally not the kind who are too much concerned about pissing off Joe Slashdot-User, who isn't going to click though anyway. They're aiming for the typical, unsavvy web user, who's not going to be too hesitant to give out his credit card details to the flashing lights and pretty colours. Popup ads are effective in generating this kind of business.
It's in AOL's interest to curb their use of popups. It'll help them keep their clients. It's not in the interest of your typical online advertiser to stop using them. Sorry kids, popups are here to stay.
- SMJ - (It's not just a name: it's a bad aftertaste.)
He's not a troll, you idiot. It's called sarcasm.
They just figured out that purposely interrupting a user's reading/viewing is annoying?!?
I suppose their next revelation will be that users don't like swift kicks to their nuts, either.
I hate AOL more than I can express in words. I would have to compose a song or paint something to adequately show my loathing for them.
Talisman
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I hope AOL choke on their own lard.
Or at least they did for me. It eventually came down to either displaying popunders or begging for Paypal donations for the rest of my site's life.
Clickthrough is spectacular on popups and popunders. You can say it's due to all the accidental clicks, but the sales figures say you're wrong. It's one of the first effective internet advertising techniques... though it can't match that other, much more effective technique called spam.
As for the editor's question, when will content providers learn that readers don't like being diverted from the content?
I don't know, but last night I tried watching the Simpsons and was diverted from the content entirely for up to two minutes at a time while commercials ran.
Hell, if that happened on the internet there would be a rebellion.
Bandwidth costs money. Servers cost money. Someone has to pay; either the readers or the advertisers. Advertisers won't pay unless we allow them to annoy our readers. So in the end you, the reader, will pay in money or in annoyance. Which do you prefer?
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Why? Because I use mozilla exclusively, and have turned off javascript's ability to
- open unrequested windows
- move or resize existing windows
- raise or lower windows
- hide the status bar
Any site I hit that says something asinine like "best viewed with Internet Explorer gets an email from me explaining why I will never bother to use their site, and (in the vast majority of cases, where I find a competitor that does adhere to standards), why I have gone to their competitor instead despite having found their page first.I keep a template of the email handy, so that only a few seconds are required to make the complaint to both the webmaster AND two others who are as high up in the firm as I can discover in a quick web search.
These sites are few and far between
In any event, there is absolutely no reason for one's web browsing experience to be the kind of popup hell described here
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I wouldn't get to used to this 'revolution' in internet advertising. Righ now 6 figure marketing execs are in thier respective war rooms trying to figure out more lucrative ways for advertising on the internet. It has been know for quite sometime that pop-ads and banner ads have a very low click-through rate. I just phear what they might come up with next to replace them ...
Where are those popups everybody seems so angry about? Haven't advertisers stopped using them around the time Mozilla was released?
Recently, I decided to redo my personal site with a PHP backend for easier updates. In the process I decided to eliminate all javascript from my site. I had an image gallery that opened images in a popup, and most of the text files were targeted at new browser windows. Turning on Moz's first version (not the newer, slightly more intelligent version) of 'Don't open new windows', it elminated about half the content on my site.
Javascript is a wonderful thing, but it's just like anything else. If abused, it's ruined for everyone.
Now, I'm happier. My users are happier. Those of us using Moz are infinitely happier than those using IE.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
User Satisfaction Skyrockets when we stop taking a sledgehammer to their computer every few minutes.
Studies are still inconclusive on the subscription results against crushing our users fingers!
-GiH
And they say we're slow.
But that's just my opinion.
This sig no verb.
What really frustrates me is that I submitted this story a week ago. It showed up in a CBSMakrketWatch article about AOL. This is not the old AOL president. He's just started recently, and that's why he's willing to try out some radical changes like this.
I've tried various add-on pop-up stoppers, but none seemed to be both effective and unintrusive. I choose to use MSIE, and was delighted to find that CrazyBrowser, a free MSIE add-on whose primary purpose is to add a tabbed interface, is supremely effective at blocking pop-up ads without also suppressing useful popups. It has a number of other cool features as well. Did I mention it's free? It's not "spyware", either. I like it a lot.
On a related and truly ironic note, I was helping my mother set up her web site on 50megs.com, and was amused that the first time I brought up her new page (using stock MSIE, no popup stoppers), a popup appeared advertising a popup blocker! At least that didn't show up again!
I've come to like KDE's Konqueror, and I've disabled JavaScript by default, and enabled it for a few sites I added manually. Even then, it's set to ask for confirmation before opening in a new window using JavaScript.
Haven't seen a popup ad since I started using Konqueror!
I know, many will say that I'm missing on a lot of the web! I don't think so. Granted, I don't visit 500 new web sites a day, but when I come across a site that uses JavaScript, I either enable it temporarily if I really want to go on that site, or I just go away. Most of the time, I go away.
Get Proxomitron
!
The setup is a it geeky, but it will remove almost all ads and popups and such crap. It also has many other powerful features and you can easilly add things to the blocklist. Since it runs as a proxy, you can point other machines on your network to it and it will filter them as well, great if being used in a buisiness to save on bandwidth costs, or to simplify home setup if you have a network with several machines in the house.
Best of all, its totally free!
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Does anyone know if Netscape 6+ has retained the popup suppression? Someone else mentioned that IE will never have it, basically because of the Good Old Boy system in business. That may well apply to the Netscape-branded Mozilla, as well. More likely they'll leave the feature in place, but remove the settings from the UI.
/. warned about popup ads on TV coming, and I saw one the other night. Forget the channel, but it might have been on The Learning Channel. It was about the same height as the watermark, twice as wide, used the same space, and animated. A small dinosaur jumped on some prey and ate it, to advertise some dinosaur show. It's size similarity to the watermark meant that I wouldn't have thought twice about it, except for having read the /. story.
There's a very real chance that popup suppression could change Internet advertising methods, if it becomes widespread.
On a similar topic,
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Try reading a little CNN to break up the flesh feast
The fee you pay monthly for internet access goes to a company called an Internet Service Provider, or ISP. This allows you physical access to the network of computers and routers called the internet.
The World Wide Web sits on the internet, and is made up of content pages called websites. But understand that the ISP does not write or administer the websites on the World Wide Web. So paying your ISP does not equal paying your friendly content providers, like the fine folks at Slashdot or Mr. Lowtax at Something Awful. They are not affiliated with the ISP's and do not receive any money from them.
Therefore the individual website operators must be funded separately, not so much for their time (though that would be nice) but for the expenses it takes to run a website. In order to run a website that can be viewed, there must be a server and another internet connection, only a much higher speed one than what you probably have. These connections are expensive. The servers are expensive. The staff hired to maintain the servers are expensive. The money must come from somewhere.
Make sense?
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Good idea!!!
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I once went 2 years without buying a single 3.5 inch floppy (you know, back when people used them) because I had gotten so many AOL disks in my mailbox. Just format those bastards and throw a clean label on 'em. Ready to go.
Ah, the magic of recycling...
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
Funny you should mention that.
I currently have a bank account with NatWest. After they 'upgraded' their site, and .asp's started appearing instead of .jsp's, it became impossible to use their online banking unless you used Internet Explorer.
Annoyed, I decided to hunt out alternatives and found Intelligent Finance, which works fine with Mozilla.
Of course, as well as working fine with Mozilla it also happens to have a drastically better mortgage than the Natwest one I currently have, and I am right now in the process of moving my mortgage over. I am saving, literally, thousands of pounds.
So...Natwest annoying me with locked-in pages lead to me going investigating competitors, which in turns lead me to switch away from Natwest completely.
Consumer preferences in action.
Cheers,
Ian
Same with Netscape, which is now just neutered Mozilla...
Privoxy will let you filter Flash ads and build specific policies for your favorite sites. I basically have a white list of sites I allow Flash from with a default denial of Flash otherwise. Ditto for cookies. I also love their "javascript annoyance" features. If you have a set list of sites you use all the time, Privoxy does a bang up job of making them PITA free.
It has a real nice web based GUI for doing all of this stuff too. I know and love the Mozilla features for doing some of this and they're quicker when surfing. But Privoxy does a far more thorough job and works with any modern browser.
And then there's Spamassassin....yum!
Revolution within the company, yeah right. Whatever such thing occurs can't hold out for long against the irrepressible and destructive looting of a company by the accountants and lawyers that run them whenever more common heads grow sleepy (which is often). I recall a bit of HP when some founder-return butt-kicking occurred. How long did that last?
... I mean, how can any ISP survive that kicks its subs offline actively?
But it does survive, and they know that this means they can do whatever they want to their subs, and when too many subs get pissed off at once, the business model implodes.
Highly metastable.
AOL is so out of touch with its customers' needs -- much like many American corporations -- that they actually needed to form some silly task force to study an obvious customer-irritation problem. AOL has a legendary lack of concern for its subscribers
AOL's business model is just one step away from the American Ultimate Business Plan. The AUBP says to collect money from customers, deliver nothing, capitalize on the delay and reluctance of the customer base to get their money back, and finally charge for the disconnect.
So, perhaps AOL will act to restrain popup ads. Big deal. Soon enough they will ramp up the ads, through some other route, and the situation will be back to the same old customer irritation. How about recording sites you visit? You can bury that in the next version's EULA; after the uproar, you can then offer "opt out"; and after another while, quietly change opt-outs to opt-ins.
Maybe we should just stop expecting AOL to be a data pipe for ourselves, and like newspapers, the pipe is for the advertisers and for our subscription dollar we can only skim off a part of that pipe for ourselves. Look, for revenue, AOL has advertisers and subs. The subs can leave at any time; but they have signed contracts with advertisers. The pressure to pay attention to the contracted money is just fscking enormous.
[also misbehaves on Kuro5hin as Peahippo]
As usual, they paid a hell of a lot of money to learn something that any random person would have told them for free. Someone once said that a million monkeys sitting at a million typewriters would eventually compose the collected works of Shakespear. We have now learned that this is not correct, a million monkees at a million keyboards will eventually form the most popular ISP in the US.
A. Be a memeber...
or...
B. Fill out a long stupid form...
The Web is really begining to suck!!
"Look where we worship" -- Jim Morrison
Does anyone know? Ideally, for me, animated images would show just their first frame and an indication that an animation is "waiting", then it would play once I give it permission to play (like by clicking on a play icon inserted into a corner of the image). I tried to make animations play "NEVER" using the Mozilla preference, but it didn't work.
How about Opera?
When i went through my warez stage and tried navigating all those completely useless topsites I just turned off graphics, disabled javascripting/activex and got rid of all those popups. If i didnt turn of javascript I would have literly hundreds of popups come up at once and crash my computer.
:)
Now luckly I've found linux and well dont need to scrounge for software and I have mozilla to kill my pop-ups. I got the gimp to replace all those copies of Adobe PS and who needs MS office when you got openoffice. Ahh truly free software and its legal too
I just use my firewall to block all connections to ads.aol.com, and a few other addresses. Now I don't get any ads in AIM at all (the normal ones above and below the buddy list just dissapear).
Click through rates are gone. No ones clicking anything anymore. No ones buying advertising because of it. The web is saturated. Theres too much advertising. I use squid to remove all ads from my browsing experiance.
The ad filter i use argues that ads are nessecary for the Internet to exist but Id like to point out, the Internet was a great place where you could get stuff done quickly, rapidly find information(intellegent info even) and communicate without someone trying to sell you crap long before the web existed. So i block all ads.
I suppose if i had the free time id send pictures of peoples websites to there owners and the advertising companies with there filtered pages just to show them that I dont see them.
Yes I enjoy slashdot. If there was no ad revenues and it folded tommmorow and I couldnt get here, Id go somewhere else. Theres always somewhere else. The Internet wasnt about profit initially. Its the morons that came here that ruined it.
For the record RTFM is polite answer to question. If you want to argue about that one get off the net. We were here first. I will continue to block all ads.
--- Always remember. 99.36% of all statistics are inaccurate.
Recently,
I had the opportunity to have the equivalent of a phone popup happen when I was attempting to make a long distance phone call.
My provider is AT&T and when I dialed my mother long-distance I was immediately presented with an AT&T advertisement that seemed to run on forever.
Then when the advertisement was finished they finally decided to put my call through.
Anyone else out there having this problem?
I just about went balistic. Needless to say I got on the customer service line with the AT&T folks and gave them a huge piece of my mind.
I don't think the masses have realized yet that popups, phone solicitations, SMS spam, you name it is going to undermine theiu ability to get anything done in the future.
Worse yet, it's going to take years before our lawmakers actually catch on to the fact that the above is happening.
I'm fed up!
...that #5 is "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane?
I feel almost as good as the day I first installed Windows XP!
"...the White Knight is talking backwards..."
Two quick points: .asp's don't break in Mozilla. ASP is strictly server side. However, .asp is often occompanied by FrontPage and IE specific code. Just wanted to make sure no one was confused on that.
1)
2) Good for you for switching, but make sure you let the old bank know that they lost a customer and why.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
A four year study has concluded that annoying your customers is not good for business.
The study also concluded that when customer satisfaction is down, one way to improve said satisfaction is not to increase the degree of annoying factors.
AOL's on the ball here people! Better pay attention!!
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
I can't imagine the ratio of displays vs. clickthroughs to be very high. I also can't imagine that these companies would be doing such a thing without keeping some sort of statistics. From a marketing point of view...how low does such a ratio have to be before a company ultimately axes an advertising campaign? It's just a baffling concept to me.
Standard Browser Behavior is both braindead and oversimplified, and there's no way out without some level above pure HTML. Tab to switch between fields, and enter to submit? Braindead - some idiot making a graphical interface act like an ascii terminal they once used. Reorder a list online? Not without Javascript. Javascript may be evil, but pure HTML is useless. HTML form default behavior is somewhere between pitiful and stupid.
There's more to this web than the static content sources and slashdot. Some people try to do work out here - database front ends, project management tools, work tracking, and more. It's a lot easier to write real web tools when you can reprogram the occasional broken browser default behavior with some javascript.
Is Javascript the wrong tool for the job? Well, it's the only tool for the job if you want to stay with a out-of-the-box web browser.
Maybe the state's highest function is to grind out insoluble problems. (Zelazny, Hall of Mirrors)
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
They wouldn't state their pages and DHTML code worked in anything other than IE, and so actually blocked Mozilla from seeing the page. If it wasn't IE (or Netscape 4.7.1 - yes, .1, not any other .), they wouldn't allow it in.
Regarding the second point - yes, I'm going to do that. I already tried to get them to sort it - there's a Bugzilla entry somewhere in the evangelism section regarding Natwest.
Cheers,
Ian
Now if only all businesses would realize that what they need to provide on the Internet is factual information about their company, product lines, etc. and forget about trying to use it as an advertising medium. Business never did understand what the net is all about...
found that focus group satisfaction went up "notably" when the number of times people were hit in the head with a hammer was cut in half.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
All pages run in PLAIN TEXT
I tried that once. I had a blowout article six months ago called LATEST WARCRAFT III SCREENSHOTS and then did the whole thing in plain text, only describing the screenshots.
Bandwidth was way down but my research shows that reader satisfaction went down with it. I'm not sure why.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
i use mozilla, but am a bit software-challenged. can anyone help?
I gave my grandmother an AOL account to surf the web with. She's quite elderly and can barely manuver the mouse. One day a 3 year old dig. camera shows up at here doorstop. Good ole AOL bombarded her with so many pop-ups and flashing windows that she became confused and ended up buying a $99 dollar camera (Not even made anymore) for over $250. Of course they automatically charged it to her account and she never even saw the bill. Way to rip off the elderly! I just want to watch them squirm as the inexperienced & inept user base they depend on keeps shrinking and they turn into more of a joke than they already are. sigh.
Side note: She can't figure she's buying a camera but she sure as heck knows how to use that damn forward button.(Notice the bitterness)
"..." - Silent Bob
An ISP that scans and removes the javascript that opens popup windows on page loads would be rather helpful.
Most geeks are just going to want 'raw Internet', but the AOL customers want the Internet mushed around and handed to them on a silver platter. Why not scan and strip annoying code? I think, to a degree, it can be done quite effectively. It would be similar to parental lock sites.
~LoudMusic
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Ethical webmasters who run "free" websites hate popups as much as you do. They realize that surfers hate them, and that by using them they are losing visitors.
But sometimes there are no other choices; faced with either closing a free site down because of lack of revenue, or running popup ads, most webmasters would choose the popups. I run some popups on my site, but I try to keep them to a minimum. Why? Because I care about my site and its visitors and I don't want to have to shut it down.
If you don't like popups, don't go back to the website that has so inconvenienced you. But don't just block the popups and continue to visit the site, because you are in essence preventing the site from generating revenue while increasing its bandwidth usage. The next time you want to visit your favorite free site, it just might not be around anymore.
AOLers don't pay their $75/month or whatever it is now to be liked by the internet community.
Pop-up ads seem to have been part of AOL's desperate, and possibly criminal, attempt to inflate earnings. AOL ran into an "ad inventory problem" - there wasn't enough space for banner ads on the main pages. Pop-ups allowed them to inflate their ad space.
Uncheck it to disallow pages from doing so. There's lots of other fun options in there, too.
Al Qaeda has ninjas!
It's not a black-and-white issue, of annoy vs. not annoy.
As in, it would annoy me less if McDonalds would give away their hamburgers for free. It would annoy me more if they suddenly charged $500.00 for them.
The answer lies somewhere in the middle, finding out how much annoyance the reader will take, and time after time it's been proven that it's just a little bit more annoyance than the reader says they will take.
(One of the reasons I signed up with FastClick, by the way, is that their popups are programmed to run only once per 24 hours per user; no spawning popups, no onclose popups, no multiple popups. Actually they're all popunders, but you get the idea.)
Traffic didn't fall when I started the popunders, traffic didn't pick up when I took them off for a time.
As for banners and product awareness, as God as my witness I wish we lived in a world where advertisers would be satisfied with a simple red banner that says "drink coke!" and would pay money for it that would cover bandwidth costs.
Hell, maybe even play a little coke theme song with it. Get the brand out there, call the job done. That's how pretty much all advertising works.
But for some reason on the internet they decided that if an ad didn't get clickthrough, that ad was a failure.
Banners get horrible clickthrough. So banners are dead. 80% of my revenue comes from popunders, even though I display far more banners.
Why did they arrive at that conclusion? They don't consider a billboard ad to be a failure just because I didn't IMMEDIATELY drive my car to the restaurant being advertised. No; they're satisfied to get the name and logo out there, and hope I remember it the next time I get hungry. Why can't internet advertising work the same way?
Their research must have told them that it didn't work that way. So now only the annoying ads pay.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
They did a big study whose results told them that their subscribers didn't like pop up ads? Are these guys MORONS? What did they think, that people wanted MORE ads? Or maybe AOL means ADVERTISING on line?
For that matter, I know of one internal web site (for a rather large company), which is written
in Java Servlets but checks for IE and sends you
to an error page if you are not running IE.
They did this after finding that a very small number of users were not using IE.
It lowers your maintenance costs to cut down on the number of browsers you support.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
There was a time when water was free. You could go get it right out of the river and drink it. Now I see people (like Evian) selling bottles of it for $2.00 apiece.
Because it was free before from another source, I am absolutely within my right to steal the bottles of water off the shelf. Us freewater users were here first. If the bottled water companies go out of business because of it, I can simply go back to drinking it out of the river.
Slashdot owes us free content at their own expense. Owes us.
Phallic Symbols in LOTR
A "new acquistition" mailing trolling for new customers will get a 1% response, more than enough for decent profitability. Mailings to established customers can range as high as 5%, it's gravy. Lands' End mails more than a billion catalogs per year.
The generic nonprofits like Red (double)Cross and United Way average about 2% at Christmas. A local charity with a well respected program can do 10% at Christmas. One I work with does 55% response at Christmas, but they have a real program and 3/4 of their take is spent on program.
A mailpiece runs about 60 cents including 19 cents postage. Nonprofits that wisely and creatively use volunteer labor can easily cut that to 35 cents, and with decent mail encoding cut the postage to 11 cents per piece.
It is ironic for NY Times to run this article. Not
long ago they rendered thie own r www site unuseful
with huge popup ads.
I wrote to them pointing out that since I am
paying customer (I subscribe for dead-tress version), I should not be subjected to that pop-up shit and they
basically responded that NY Times paper and www.nytimes.com are different entities and they need
to eard money.
The Red Cross and UW commonly mail millions of pieces at a time The charity with the 55% response generates $500,000 a year with 4 mailings of 5000 pieces each.
Direct mail is the way to go. Beats hell out of radio, door hangers, windshield wiper fliers TV, and newspapaper. The last venue is especially worthless. Those little rectangle ads in mags like Smithsonian are also effective.
Part of AOL's problem is that they inverted their priorities. Sure, they're primo priority is to make money. But you have a choice. Build the business to serve the customer, or serve the target income?
I think the U.S. Post Office model of increasing rates to compensate for loss revenue helps us answer that question. Instead of raising rates, make the lines shorter, make priority mail delivery dependable instead of "2 or 3 days or whenever, but there is no guarantee for you paying more," and other things. Instead, for years they have raised rates while continually cutting back services and then sit there and wonder what the problem is.
Here's another model comparison to think about. What if the computer system at your local motor vehicle administration was as efficient as the state's lotto system?
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Bullshit. Where is the data that pop-ups work? The best they do is create false positive page views by loading pages you didn't request. I have never purchased ANYTHING from a popup, nor ever visited a site pointed my way via a pop-up, and neither do most people.
Pop-ups, like SPAM, are evil and do little more than piss people off.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Buddy! Do the sensible thing a drop the official AIM client. Grab yourself a copy of the freeware Trillian which is a truly excellent messenger and can connect to AIM, ICQ, MSN, YIM (yahoo instant msg) and IRC. I use it religiously when in windows.
Considering how much AOL charges, it amazes me that they need pop-up/pop-under ad revenue to stay afloat. Like all non-profitable business ventures, they should die.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
readers don't like to be forcibly diverted from what they are doing
/. editors should understand.
And television watchers don't like having commercials interrupt the program they are watching. The fact is that there has to be a balance between what the readers want and what they have to endure to get the content at the price they get it at. Either they have to pay more, or they have to get the ads.
Really what AOL should have done is made a higher price where no popups would occur. Customers who really hated them would pay the higher price. The others will feel like their getting something for free because the popups are easy to dismiss.
This is something
-no broken link
I only stuck with Altavista as long as I did because I had grown accustomed to their "NEAR" search keyword. Google has no equivalent.
Since switching, I've found that Google gives better search results -- but I wouldn't have discovered this if Altavista had not actively driven me to the competition through their obnoxious advertising policies.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
According to Norton 2002
The celebphoto site actually has a javascript virus called
the "JS. Exception" which tries to exploit an unpatched Internet Explorer vunerability, before clicking , if you are using an old IE (or you are using an unpatched IE) things will get messy for you, and if you have permission get updated NOW
You can save several different configs which you can swap between, allow certian sites to pass-through by default, and it has a button on the main GUI to toggle on/off all filters if you are getting snagged on something it's filtering.
I've been considering putting together some filters so I can strip out excess content by using my home computer as a proxy for my palm pilot (running Xiino).
I'm kind of disappointed that development has stopped on it, but I'm figuring someone will pick up the torch and take the idea further.
Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
I used to use Trillian for long time. I loved it for exactly the reason you say - one client, multiple messengers. IRC was a bonus. But there were too many other features missing at the time. Drag N' Drop file sending is a must. Group chat was also not so good in Trillian. Maybe I should head back to their site and review the latest version. Though, Anonymous Coward replied that he could filter the ads w/ his firewall. That sounds promising.
Rather than CTRL+ALT+DEL, just select the awful floating abomination and press ALT+F4. It's still an IE Window and still responds as an application.
Any spoon would be too big.
The sad part is that AOL had to create a "task force" to figure this thing out. All you have to do is ask x number of internet users and they'll tell you the same.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
Also file sending is still lacking, but I just send e-mail attachments or use FTP with my friends, so again it's not a problem for me.
Yes its a dumb title, but this is a great piece of software. I'm pretty dam jaded when it comes to browser addon's but this local proxy stops popups, protects your privacy, stop flash ads, blocks banners, etc etc. IMHO there are no solutions which even remotely compare to it in the number of features it has. Moz as much as I love it doesn't even compare no matter how much you hack up user.js. Plus it works with ANY browser because of course who wants to be stuck with only one browser that can stop popups?
Anyway if you use windows on your desktop your really missing out if you don't use Proxomitron. Oh yea, it free as well.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
UI used to run The Wage of Sim, a "The Sims" page that consumed 2.8GB of bandwidth every day. It cost me $400.00 a month to host. I tried to get banner ads on my site. No dice. You'd think with a site getting several thousand unique visitors a day I might get some interest. Nope. No one outside of the porn industry wanted to touch me for some reason. And I was not willing to run porn ads. I tried donations, but I never got more than $100.00 in any particular month, ever.
Rather than submit to porn or popups, I closed my site. It was a nice hobby while it lasted, and I'm not happy that I had to close the site.
There are times you have to ask yourself if the pain of doing something is worth the return.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Actually if you install the Mozilla bannerblind plugin flash banners can be blocked just beautifully as well.
Feel free to copy my no-javascript-popup template:
To: [Giant Company]
Subject: Your popups don't work on [page]
If you click the [picture] to make it bigger, nothing happens. This is because I, along with thousands of other visitors, disable javascript.
An easy fix is to make the popup work both WITH and WITHOUT javascript, as explained by J. Korpela: Hope this helps.
Where's my 514 page marketing research BiBLE on this - aha ...
HERE it is - It reads "Pop-Up Ads, or 'Micro-sites' are a sure method of gaining user interest."
They must be working.?
It says here - "Internet users prefer to be made aware of products in the most irritating way possible"
and that...
Users wish to be treated as intelligent individuals with the will to choose between the products you want them to choose from.
Well, we'll just have to take over thier damn operating systems if they don't listen !
Heck - I reckon that we should pass a law allowing unauthorised access to anyones computer if you can get the law on your side...
Pop-up ads anyone ?
A slashdotting - you get the stick first and then the carrot !
OK, in the case of AOL, killing pop-up ads is a good thing! They already charge a ridiculous amount of $$$ for a poor dial-up service (although their cable modem service isn't too bad). However, they shouldn't advertise on a service that you are already paying for! Isn't that why you are paying ... to have a "clean", user-friendly service? Take for example HBO, Showtime, etc ... you pay for those services so that you don't have commercials! There are free (or nearly free) ISP services available.. so why are they charging??
... and people just don't seem to understand this. I am all for a free Internet, but it just can't be "totally free" with the current system (an entirely different topic best left alone here). People that are providing free web sites NEED that revenue just to keep their free service running. My games get 20-30 million page views per month, and we just pay the bills (and occasionally upgrade or repair equipment).
... you can either deal with the pop-up ads, pay for the service, or watch the Internet get taken over by the corporate world ... I personally like option #1 myself. For all of you that really can't stand pop-up ads, you should be making donations to sites you frequent often (our sites take donations, then we remove the banner ads from your account) to help support those sites. If you don't want to support these sites in some manner, I feel that you loose your right to complain. Beggers can't be choosey!! :)
....
Now, there are cases where killing pop-up ads is a VERY bad thing. I am a little biased on this since I do run a free online game service (http://www.coldfirestudios.com), but we give our players the option to pay-2-play if they don't want pop-up ads. The problem is this: many web sites NEED the pop-up revenue!! Regular banners pay (at best) $0.10 CPM (after commission), where pop-up ads pay about $0.30 CPM. That may not sound like much, but it is THREE times the revenue. Don't get me wrong, I'm not being greedy, but the bandwidth costs BIG $$$
I know this is a little off topic, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to remind the non-paying public that people running "free" web sites still have to pay for the equipment and bandwidth. All I ever here (concerning pop-up ads) is how evil and distracting they are. Keep this in mind when complaining
Just my two cents
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
All the while reading the NYT article, a little voice in my head kept saying over and over:
"Who the f*ck cares about AOL anymore?"
I was about to type in a similar rant, but you nailed my feelings exactly.
Connecting AOL to the internet was a mistake both for the AOL user and the typical Internet user (of the time).
"Scaling back" popup ads has been a "catalyst for revolution" at AOL? Wow. I guess "not sucking" would be, what, a "thermonuclear orgasm for nirvana"?
I can just imagine the top executives at AOL... "What is this?!?!?! People actually DON'T LIKE pop up ads?! I thought they loved them!!"
It even got rid of the Ads on /. !
It lowers your maintenance costs to cut down on the number of browsers you support.
Only if you write crap from the beginning. I work as a webdeveloper (most perl) and I don't see why anyone would block out browsers or even how they can design something so badly it (almost deliberate it seems sometimes) breaks compability.
Recently, they've been sending them in these really nice tin CD cases. Of course, with the AOL logo plastered all over them. I took them downstairs to my workshop, and I ground off the logo on my bench grinder (with a wire-wheel). Now I have these incredibly useful, nice, free, tin CD cases - courtesy of AOL. Thanks, Steve!
(never used your service, never will).
Don't read Time - Don't watch CNN. I don't even watch Bugs Bunny cartoons anymore. Am I violating copyright every time I sing "kill da wabbit!" to myself?
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
It's official now! Customers hate popups! This is serious opposition! Um... RESISTANS! Yeah!
But wait... we already knew that. So why are they still around? Oh, yeah. They're a cash cow.
The next big thing is probably going to be those meta refresh ads that force you to look at an ad for N seconds before showing the actual page. That seems just jaw-droppingly arrogant and obnoxious enough to be a commercially viable avenue, don't you think?
This isn't a surprise, if you think about it. A company that uses Microsoft lock-in stuff, isn't likely to be competitive with normal companies. Next time you're at any place of business, look around and see if they run Windows. If they do, remember: the stockholders aren't eating that waste. It always passed on to the customers.
Dude, it sounds like your machine still has the offending software on it, stored in some obscure location and maybe running as an extension of explorer. You should probably just do a clean install of Windows at this point. Then switch to Mozilla and block all popups.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Have you ever gotten a positive response?
(if any)
You didn't finish reading my comment, did you?
If you had, you would have realized that the answer to your question is a pleasantly surprising "yes."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
The paradox that content providers are finding themselves in is interesting. No advertisements, equals no revenue. No revenue means you can't pay the bills, and the site goes offline.
:)
Advertisements piss people off, and they get annoyed and stop hitting the site.
ok we all know all of that.
What happened to me recently was very interesting.
I got sick and tired of the ads on alberta.com. Specifically, the news. I really enjoyed reading the news on alberta.com because of how they set it up... I can get national, provincial, or international news, or all of it together. A few months ago.. I noticed that every single fsking time I clicked on a news story, a popup ad came up. SO, if i read say... 12 news stories in one visit, I had 12 browser windows open with the SAME ad. (or I had clicked them closed 12 times)
I got so mad that I emailed them. I thought they wouldn't care, let alone reply to me. I was wrong.
They care about you!
this is the reply I got within 48 hours of firing off my flame mail:
"Thanks for the feedback.
Sorry to hear you're so upset about the advertising on Alberta.com, but we have
faced a difficult challenge: Drastically cut the
amount of news we purchase for our users, or subsidize that content by responding to
advertisers' demands for increasingly more
intrusive advertising.
We are working on trying to ensure that most pop-up advertising occurs once per
session. I'll pass this along to our advertising
department to see if something can be done. In the meantime, we can only hope you
give us another chance.
Thanks,
Rob Klovance
Managing Editor
TELUS Multimedia Solutions"
Interestingly, within a couple weeks, the popup ads were gone. It seems that there are more (and bigger) ads on the site (wihch I much more prefer over popups), and I don't know if this was a result of my measly flame mail, or if I was merely one of hundreds that voiced my opinion, but one thing is clear:
If you like a website, but you're ready to stop hitting it because you are so annoyed, tell them! They want to hear from you. You are more important to their site than the advertisers. Oh, and thanks Rob.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
I imagine that the previous poster was thinking of public web pages when he said that.
Of course your clients can control what browsers are used with what configurations in your case.
All of that is likely true.
However, he would be doing his clients a big favor if he avoided using popup() and, for that matter, any of the other features I mentioned in my original post as having been disabled. By doing so he would allow his clients to have all the snazzy features they've requested, but also allow them to have a much more pleasant web browsing experience when viewing public sites.
Since most people likely do both, that would be a huge plus. He could even sell it as a feature, with a little note to his clients: "Use Mozilla, change these settings, and not only will you find your customized website working perfectly, you'll get rid of all those annoying popup windows on other sites that have been driving you nuts."
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Is that if you punch someone repeatedly in the kidneys for long enough, then it'll seem like heaven when you switch to just jabbing them in the ribs.
Since when did sucking less equate to being actually good?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
My AOL>Preferences>Marketing> POP-UP
Now just disable the rest and its almost like your not using aol at all..
Quack, quack.
Yes, AOL, it was a great idea to spend a lot of money on researchers and focus groups to tell you what EVERYONE IN THE WORLD ALREADY KNOWS:
..."
People hate popup-ads. Period.
Truly, has anyone ever said, "Gee, great site, but I wish there were more popup ads
This one is on Mozilla's frequently reported bugs list:
2 24
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=126
if your *preferred* browser does not support the ECMA script standard, than shame on you
In other words, you recommend any web browser that fully supports the ECMAScript language and the W3C DOM. My question: What web browser would you recommend for machines that are too old to be fast enough for Mozilla, but for which the entity in charge of the budget refuses to make money available for a replacement?
NOTE: I did not say, "You are wrong." I asked, "What browser would you recommend?"
Will I retire or break 10K?
I'll gladly give up whatever conveniences JS supposedly offers
So how do I design a web system that checks a form for empty required fields without pulling a server-side page and incurring a huge delay caused by Internet latency? (Or is that one of the "conveniences" you speak of?)
Will I retire or break 10K?
You can verify forms via JS, or you can verify your form input at the server.
Or both.
Speed to process the request being inconsequential, why not do it closer to your application's code and therefore achieve [correctness and elegance benefits]?
Because the assumption that speed is inconsequential is not always valid. Yes, I agree that correctness demands that the server must check all input, and for a LAN application, a server-side-only strategy may prove beneficial, but why should I have to pay beaucoup bucks for long-haul data transfer on the part of a user who has left most of the required fields in a form empty? And why should I lose customers to the competition that does use some limited JS to provide a faster experience?
Will I retire or break 10K?
special pop-up ad to let you know of their new commitment to customer satisfaction
Here's my speculation about what such a popup would look like:
And then after 3 impressions for an account, it disappears.
Will I retire or break 10K?
from the fighting-back dept.
...instead?
Shouldn't that read...
from the no-shit dept.
we are building a religion
a limited edition
we are now accepting callers
for these pendant key chains
To the competitor, letting them know why you switched. Just so that they get reinforcement for sticking to standards.
Captain 'Bleedin' Obvious ???
duh!!!!!!
No. 1
Lakini's Juice, Live
No. 2
King Nothing , Metallica
Dunno about rest.
> The site I am currently working on is aimed at users within large corporations.
> They have asked for (and got) some pretty wizzy features, many of which are
> simply not possible to implement without JS (or some other kind of scripting).
> Given that all of them (and I mean ALL) are using either NS or IE, and will
> almost certainly have JS enabled, am I supposed to turn around and say
> "sorry, we can't make the site JS only, it goes against my geek principles"? I think not.
At work...
1) It's my employer's computers, paid for out of my employer's pocket, and therefore my employer's rules
2) We can reasonably trust apps written by our own corporate IT programmers
On the Wild Wild Web
1) It's my computer, paid for out of my pocket, and therefore my rules
2) Yes, they *ARE* out to get you
On the WWW, "wizzy" features mean
- at best to throw pop-up/pop-under garbage at me.
- many people complain about sites (not just porn sites anymore) that throw open so many windows that the resource usage crashes the browser, if not the OS.
- at worst, malicious scripts can compromise your machine. One vector for NIMDA's spread was for script-enabled IE browsers to view infected web-pages. How soon people forget.
The thing about mobile code (Java/Javascript/ActiveX/Fuckwave-Slash) is that *YOUR MACHINE IS DOWNLOADING AND EXECUTING FOREIGN CODE*. I happen to be 50, and I remember the days of BBS's, when it was pounded into people that that you do *NOT* download and execute every last single program you run across. Why have we forgotten this lesson ?
It may be safe for a cute secretary to walk down the hall from your office in a mini-skirt at 2:30 PM. It's a totally different matter at 2:30 AM in the bad section of town. Running with Javascript enabled may be safe on a corporate intranet, but not on the web.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
I get very few popup ads, and very little hassle from Javascript. I use Incontinent Exploder, with general security settings quite high (no javascript and other settings). Sites I want to see, and want to allow javascript for, I add to Trusted Sites list, https requirement switched off, and security settings much lower. This way if a site opens a popup, I know exactly which one it is - the one I just added to the trusted list, and can remove it. If it does open someone else's site, that site usually doesn't have javascript enabled and can't do it's dirty deeds = end of infinite porn site loops. Junkbuster takes care of cookies for me, and if I add a site to the trusted list, and it annoys me, I just add it to the Junkbuster block list as a reminder next time I visit that site. Junkbuster also blocks a lot of banner ads. If I want to see a site that uses javascript and it opens popups, I just block the popup site with Junkbuster and, ok I still get the popup but I don't get any of the crap in it! I still allow ads from some sites - /. of course, but not many.
It took a 'task force' and probalby a stack of money to come to the conclusion that people don't like pop-ups?
How sad...
-Mark
Dovie'andi se tovya sagain.
Sherlock.
Jesus christ.
Could you please reconsider your position on having underlined links on your website?
I don't know about you, but I hate playing "magic mouse cursor" and "computer user, 1st day" as I relearn a new interface for every website I ever browse.
I know I try to keep my site dead easy to use. It still looks good, IMO, and it has such features as underlined hyper links for easy finding. Wonder of wonders, I also have it setup so that if you visit a link, it changes colour. Stops people from accidently revisiting stuff.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
2) Good for you for switching, but make sure you let the old bank know that they lost a customer and why.
No; a thousand times NO. They had their chance and screwed up. You don't owe them useful information for providing such lousy customer support. It's best if they lost all their customers and went under completely. The thing to do is to let your new bank know why you chose them.
Hence, they can charge more for advertising and put more of it on (no competition).
Because you aren't running a closed-shop company developing web pages for internal use only. And you haven't arbitrarily had "compatibility" declared to mean "appears exactly identical to how it looks on this page of spec." Not "close" but "exact".
If you were running a shop that was supposed to run IE only, then you could tell your developers "Write your web pages to work on IE 4.0. Don't worry about other browsers. If the testers using IE like them, they're golden."
Do you have any idea how much more time it would take to test every web page written with every successful browser out there? I'll give you a big clue: multiply your testing staff by four. Just for our team that would be 40 testers instead of ten. Then, go to your director and tell her that you need 4 times the payroll budget for testing because you have two users running Mozilla and one guy running Opera somewhere in the north campus building, and three guys with AOL somewhere out in California. Oh, and you'll need cube space and computers for each of the new testers.
I don't care if YOU know how to develop web pages properly so they appear identical on all platforms. That's a skill I can't afford to teach every developer I hire. If I can hire IE-only web monkeys to crank out IE-only pages, and get away with one fourth the testing budget, I can tell you your web-page purity and HTML/JavaScript/Perl knowledge won't mean sh!t in this real corporate world of budgets and deadlines.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's late and you're wrong.
John
First of all, anyone stupid enough to not know that they NEED to disable javascript deserves what they get. I could go over all the problems with javascript, but I've done it again and again on /. .
AND QUIT WITH MOZILLA. I think I should put together a few pages that will demonstrate how to popup windows even with Mozilla configured to block them (mail.com is a start). One way is an incorrectly configured frameset, or frame with a refresh tag. And oh so many other ways.
As well as all the other annoyances javascript brings, like infinite javascript alerts, forcing you to kill your browser. On-Mouse-Overs that open PDFs or MP3s, popup windows, etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Well first /. post here after lurking for 12 months or so.
/etc/hosts is about 400K and I don't see many adverts), firewalls, ad busters and other things. Well technology is a funny thing and now the webmasters are beginning to fight back.
Sure people hate adverts and popups and believe they have some god given right to try and stop with with doctored hosts files (ok my
Two small time developers (that I know of) have created anti-advert blocking scripts www.antiadbuster.com and www.antiadblocker.com . What these scripts do is check to see if you are blocking adverts and if you are then they block you from viewing any content.
No Adverts = No Content.
I havn't yet placed this software on my highest trafficed site www.aarons-jokes.com but I intend to shortly. It is a matter of simple economics, if I am displaying up to 40,000 pages of content a day I have a big bandwidth bill that has to be paid. I provide visitors content on the condition that they view my adverts which pay the bills. In my opinion if you are viewing my site's content and using some technical solution to block the advertisments then you are STEALING my content.
I hope that a large number of smaller independant webmasters will start using these type anti-advert blocking software on their sites. When these cheap ass surfers start getting blocked from sites they are wanting to visit because they are blocking the adverts they might finially understand that unfortunately adverts are a necessiary evil in supporting websites.
It is not like us webmasters are getting fat from huge profits from these adverts. Most of us are bearly coverting costs.
"FreeBSD is my web server & desktop platform & it rocks, take note linux and M$ users the BSD family will be taking over the world soon."
That's a good point about letting the new bank know. But if your goal is to expand the use of standards and not to blast fools from existence, then let the old bank know as well.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
You are obviously not a paid web programmer.
...But without JavaScript, web design would never become web _programming_; it would never be more than forms and submit buttons, some "pretty" images.
JavaScript is both the bane and the light of our existence. Pickier than Perl, very few quality debuggers available, cross-browser and -platform idiosyncratic, JavaScript is hell.
The web browser is highly limited in the functionality it exposes to a program (going to use "program" instead of "page/site/URL/whatever"). The _only_ thing granting us any flexibility at all is JS. Combine it with CSS and you've all of a sudden got the ability to make programs that can do nearly anything a standalone EXE can.
The program I'm proudest of, in fact, is one standalone HTML file that doesn't need to be connected to the Internet to work at all. Using JavaScript, CSS, and WDDX, the program takes orders from thousands of agents in the field for a wide variety of phone services, from long distance to frame relay (yes, frame relay, the monster of telecomm). Whenever the agent decides he wants to upload his orders to us, typically at the end of the day, he connects and clicks send. This is great for people sitting on a dial-up connection or in a small business, and great for an agent with a laptop taking an order in a customer's office.
Thanks to JavaScript, this little HTML file replaced an entire C++ program - 72K replacing a 4Mb EXE.
If you want to force yourself to use HTML only and every time you want to update something on the page you hit the server, go be a martyr, see where it gets you. You obviously don't have real users depending on you to make their jobs easier and keep you in yours. Acting like you're better than everyone cos you "force yourself" to use outdated technology is, well, lame.
If a site uses popups (and gets through Mozilla's filtering), then I leave and don't come back. I don't show up in their statistics at all, but they did lose a potential customer. It seems that AOL has finally caught on to this.
What we need is good end-user to creator payment options, and we need them fast. For many things, voluntary micropayments would work great, IMHO, for other things, other models must be empployed.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid