Slashdot Mirror
Next-Gen Pop-up Ads
bje2 writes "CNet has a disconcerting story about a new generation of pop-up ads that use a "kick through" technique such that you don't even need to click on the pop-up ad anymore, you just need to mouse over it...wow, can they make our web surfing experience any worse?"
I seem to recall being subjected to mouse-over pop-ups a while ago, as well as on-load and on-close popups. Is this actually a new thing, or is the article just not up to date on how the web works?
Pop-ups are by far the single most annoying thing on the web. I'd say that by this trend, we're only a step away from the pop-up ad that automatically installs GATOR and whatnot just by sitting at a keyboard.
What is disconcerning about these ads that it's the same thing as if you were watching TV, and there was a product on the screen. By glancing at the product, your channel is changed to an Infomercial about that product. If it's anything like other ads, changing back to your channel will give you 4 PIP windows that support that product and other products by that company.
I thought it was bad enough when I saw the anti-pop scripting that existed on a site I went to. I still use my trusty Pop-UP Killer (may it rest in peace), and was rather annoyed to be denied access to a site based on my software choice.
I am seriously starting to wonder about the legality of pop-up ads and internet spyware. I don't have a problem with things that function like a TV commericial (banner ads, or Advertisement and Click-to-continue at Gamespy), but I despise it when someone else tries to determine what I should look at, and hate it even more when someone decides to put something I didn't authorize on my system.
I say we gather up all these pop-up authors in room. Tie them all together, and make them run Windows Me on 386s. After that, we'll just send them to Equitorial Guinea to be humanitarian workers.
This has started with things like disabling the blink tag and having pop-up blockers, and now we see that browsers should not allow certain actions to be triggered simply by a mouseover, and so on. Remember things like this the next time you see someone on bugzilla commenting about how the browser has to respect command X because it's in the standard!
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
This all sounds like nice possibilities for Mozilla (andother alternative browsers) to block those annoying ads in their default setup. Maybe M$ Internet Explorer might catch up one day, but I'm not waiting for that! ;-p
Hmm... Moz can't just block these kind of ads or all those javascript menus and other leditimate onMouseOver scripts that's quite common might stop working.
However, Moz could add a feature similar to "block images from this server", but "block scripts from this server". However, the scripts can still be on the actual web server which won't help much since it would again block *all* scripts from the server which we don't want.
A solution might be to tell Mozilla to "block scripts associated with images of this size".
That's the best I can think of now, since ads almost never change size and it's fairly unusual to have legitimate images in the same standardized size as advertisments.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
The heck with ignoring them! Most companies pay to advertise and that payment is oft-times based on CLICK-THRU!! They put on the blindfold and walked right up to the wall, i say we PULL THE TRIGGER! Everytime you find one of the mouse-pop URL, give it to all your friends and spend a couple of minutes just reloading and mousing over and closing after 30 seconds. O*bitz and anyone else foolish enough to do this will soon be BANKRUPT! BWAHAHAHAHA!!!
This could get very interesting.
AOL shipped NS 7.0 without popup blocking because that would hurt advertisers' interests, but reversed their decision because of public outcry.
MS, of course, isn't bothered just yet. Now if more people start blocking popups with mozilla/netscape, advertisers will start trying more agressive methods, in turn leading more people to switch.
Could this tussle lead to a spiralling backlash against MSIE?
It's the same numbers game that the SPAM mongers are playing.
Ie, if you can get even one half of one percent to buy something, with over 1 million people hitting your site, you still get 5000 customers. If each of those customers buy just one thing, the company is making money off of their "efforts".
Those who don't like it and don't buy are considered to not have wanted to buy in the first place.
The same is true of passing out flyers, sending spam emails, or going door-to-door. A numbers game.
Winged Power Photography
Removed http://images.slashdot.org/banner/tkbg5001en.gif From outbound connections Because /banner/
All that crap about interstitial ads and servers that detect whether you're clicking through some percentage of ads and lock you out if you don't NEVER MATERIALIZED, and the marketing droids have had years of banner blockers existing to think about it.
I sometimes shut the blocker off just to try to see what everyone is wailing and complaining about. I'm convinced that there will always be enough people that don't bother to just block the stupid things that the handful of people who never see ads have nothing to worry about. Witness the number of slashdotters complaining about ads right here. Whatever. I don't see any ads.
Almost every executible GUI program we use today has many of these kinds of "pop-up" dialog boxes - some more complicated than others (from confirmation dialogs to config screens). And all of them serve a useful purpose.
I'm a firm believer that developing apps using HTTP/(X)HTML as an interface is a smart move, as opposed to writing an executible for a specific platform - since it is a true write-once, run-anywhere tech (well, access-anywhere, at least from as far as client access is concerned.) And there's no reason we, as web developers, shouldn't be able to use pop-up windows for web-enabled apps.
Just because commercial sites the world over have abused pop-(up|under)s, doesn't mean the technology itself is useless.
ps. - I realize Mozilla allows you to disable scripts from opening "unrequested" windows (ie. where any "window.open" call is ignored, unless it applies to link you just clicked), but for a complicated site with various domains (eg. secure/non-secure), or other complications, it still isn't a robust enough solution to those of use developing true web-enabled applications.
The funny thing is, that companies that advertise like that then go on to claim that the hit count received by their website represents genuine interested visitors.
This of course is BS, but the sadly uneducated tech. media of today write an article about.
X10 did this, I got sick of reading in Computer Weekly etc. how X10 became one of the most visited sites on the Internet.
Visted???? Visited my pointed haired a***.
No, that would be just too intrusive. Instead, I'm guessing that we'll see more of
Just like ads in magazines, or commercials on TV.
I have javascript turned off, sound on, never installed flash, no shockwave, and no other scripting junk. Images are off.
I don't see any ads, and it is rare that I run across a web site (always a business site) that requires flash for navigation. If so, I go elsewhere.
Don't miss a thing.
I use Mozilla for the rare circumstances that I'm in windows (while using P2P only), and Mozilla and Konqueror while in Gnu/Linux.
I don't get ANY popup ads with Mozilla or Konqueror. And I do get popup password boxes or registration boxes (like the Linuxworld popups for "other" in some of the demographic questions).
On Mozilla, with images off, there's the image button top center whenever I want to view images. Konqueror requires a click on the menu, follow the arrow to pop up other boxes (forget the box right now) and click once more. No biggie.
I have another user I tried for a long time to convince not to use cookies and javascript when he used IE. Then I introduced him to Mozilla and tabbed browsing. But the most important feature that stopped him from accepting all cookies and javascript on by default was a neat little plugin or extension or whatever it's called, written by someone else, and located on sourceforge if I remember correctly. I saw the info on it on a slashdot posting, and am so glad I installed it.
What is it? It is a small toolbar that sits below the Home/Bookmarks/Mozilla/Latest Builds toolbar. At the extreme right, it has a "customize" drop down box. I can select fonts, colors, images, javascript, popups, cookies, java, use proxies, allow on Load popups, enable XUL cache. If any of these are selected in the drop down box, then they appear on the toolbar. So on this toolbar right now, I see fonts, colors, images, javascript, popups, and cookies. The rest are not checked in the drop down box, and therefore do not appear on my toolbar.
Now for the items on my toolbar, a checkbox appears to the immediate left of each item. I currently have fonts and colors checked off, and these two are always checked off. Images, javascript, popups, and cookies are not checked. Whenever I want to see an image, I can right-click on the image indicator and open it, or I can check the box for images, and all images are immediately loaded. If I check javascript, javascript is enabled, and the page is immediately refreshed so that I don't have to do it manually to get javascript functionality. Same with popups, which I rarely need to use, and cookies which I do need to use from time to time.
I have total control over my browsing with this toolbar. I never see popups. Javascript is always off, and takes less than a second to turn on. Images? Don't miss them at all. When I need to see something, the button is right there in front of me.
In Konqueror, I don't have this toolbar, but I don't see popups, images are off by default, with an image button top center, and javascript is enabled on specific sites only, and turned on for other sites (rarely) as needed. Konqueror, like Mozilla, allows fine tuning of javascript for specific sites.
The toolbar for Mozilla is great. I have other users that wouldn't turn off cookies no matter what I tried, and who now turn them off by default thanks to the toolbar.
So where is this toolbar? I wish I had a link. It is on sourceforge somewhere. I think it was listed as a bug(?) or as a solution to a listed bug(?) or something like that. I wish I could be more specific. Sorry. Try a google search. I lost the original link from slashdot post myself, and googled to find it. It took me a long time to find it, but I have little experience with sourceforge.
Try googling for "toolbar, images, javascript, popups, cookies, mozilla" and anything else you think is relevant. I had to check out numerous sites before I found it. Good luck.
And I have images off by default because I tried it, and liked it. I hate in your face ads. And they are not off because I use dialup. I have a very fast dsl business line. Although surfing images off would work wonders for dialup. Can't wait to try it when I get a better laptop.
Why don't us geeks just stop using convetonal web browsing all together. Perhaps some type of p2p network except with useful information, insted of JUST porn and warez. And design it so there isn't a very good way to advertise on it either. :)
-makoffee
You're missing my point - if the ads don't annoy me, then I don't avoid the company that placed the adverts, and they don't learn the lesson that annoying potential cusotmers is bad for business.
Anti-advert technology (such as Mozilla's pop up filtering, which I have turned on, and it's gif loop blocking which I choose not to have turned on btw) is removing the negative feedback element, which I feel is important if the offenders are to learn not to offend. All that happens is that the adverts carry on annoying the technological underclass that dosen't block them.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Anybody who's done much Javascript can come up with plenty more annoying tricks, like hiding the close buttons, popping up a fake window, etc. Yahoo sortof does some of these with the DHTML ads. I guess the content providers wouldn't like it, but there's alot more annoying things that could be done. That being said, this is plenty annoying for me.
A small text-only non-obtrusive add that -- most importantly -- links to a comment section where potential clients can comment on the advertiser and, glory be, some rep from that company is there to answer questions and address criticisms.
For example, this ad and comment page for Johncompanies helped convince me to get a virtual dedicated host with them.
It also has the added benefit that the advertiser gets a real-life feel for how effective the ad is, and doesn't have to rely on some easily falsifiable clickthrough or impression report from the advertising company.
Now, if you're peddling shit, I'm sure this kind of instant-feedback type ad is not going to be your cup-of-tea. Another reason why I like these ads.
I wouldn't be surprised that Microsoft is working on Internet Explorer 7.0 right now, which will probably be part of the next version of Windows (Windows Longhorn).
I wouldn't be surprised that IE 7.0 will include controls to tightly control pop-over/pop-under ads, given that these ads do tend to hog system resources and slow the WWW surfing experience.
Browsing without javascript helped me to realize that the advertising community has hijacked javascript; it is time web developers realized that.
I give you this:/ ts/docu ments/uninstall.htm /. space).
...
... I removed it after my ISP put moving flash ads on every single one of their webmail pages, at a time when I had to use webmail i/o pop. Remove all directories which are called macromedia, look through the windows registry, and it still moves... bloody h*ll.
..." in a similar way to their "block images from ..." setup, and their "don't loop" -setup for images.
http://www.macromedia.com/support/flashcom
(without the
I find it unbelievable that you get pointers to installing the bloody thing everywhere, but you have to look hard to find out how to get rid of it
I'll reinstall flash when the mozilla devteam adds buttons that says "block flash from
On that note, thank-you Mozilla devteam, for all the annoyance-blocking goodies in the browser!
-- Henriette's herbal -
You need two programs to do that, bash and wget. You can write one (long) line to do just that:
shell$ for i in `seq 1 1000`; do wget --user-agent='Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)' --cache=off --referer=http://www.x10.com/products/ http://www.x10.com/images9/abkc_sidecam.jpg; rm -v abkc_sidecam.jpg; done [enter]
or you could even run something million times more effective, like this:
shell$ for i in `seq 1 1000`; do wget --user-agent='Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)' --cache=off --mirror -e robots=off http://www.x10.com/products/; rm -rfv *x10.com; done [enter]
Technically it's trivial, you can use Bash/wget, you can use Perl/LWP, etc. But the question is: wouldn't it be more evil than the popups themselves?
root@aio:~# nmap -sX -iR -p1- # Ho, ho, ho! Merry Xmas, everyone!
Actually, the advertising companies are run by very smart people, who are very good at sucking money out of their customers (the merchants).
Whether an ad is effective or not is not the advertising company's problem -- so long as the customer THINKS it is, and keeps renewing their ad contract.
It follows that the morons are the people *buying* these advertising contracts.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Although Microsoft has most likely done reasearch on pop up ad's and are aware of their customers wanting such a feature, Especially when MSN competitors are touting Pop Up Blockers as a feature of their service, not to mention the deceptive nature of popups these days, Microsoft Will not do it.
Why you Ask? Because They will get Sued for Being a Monopoly or Stifiling Competition, and Lose.
Dont Believe Me? When Outlook Express 4 was in it's beta stages, It had a spam filter similar to the one that Hotmail and Outlook currently have. You dont see it in Outlook Express because a company that was sending newsletters sued them for being a Monopoly because the Spam filter would fiter the companies Legitmate E-mail. Even though Microsoft explained that it was the way they were sending the mail and there was an easy fix to it, they didn't budge, They won the case, and Spam continues to flow to inboxes.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Hey what a cool idea. Yes I need some samples of this stuff. Please give me samlple code... Wait lets not do that. bad aenough we are telling everyone it could be done. Now using IE will be more annoying as everyone who didnt know about it soon will. I will not blame slashdot. I just dont think anyone will do anything constructive to stop this if the people programing the brousers want pop up support. Oh well mozilla seems to be working faster for me anyway. That I asumes makes some of you happy. I dont like changing software if what I have works well. So I will still be running 98 and IE when it suits me. Besides if it has pop ups I KNOW its a crappy inconciderate site and thus restart exprorer and not visit it. I know several web sides that DO NOT link to sides with pop ups. I may be better off who knows. So please set your policy to not link to those sites with this on your pages it makes you look bad. With enough luck we will route around this and be better for it. I can put up with pop ups for now.
Perhaps google could offer a new service that only indexes sites that are bobby & w3 safe? that would help us all enforce good behavior on the WWW.
Actually, I was thinking of something like this recently. There are a few really common bits of recycled code on the web. If google would look at the JS on the sites they index and determine if it is one of the common scripts which intends to spawn a popup onload (and even worse if that popup has onmouseover JS) they could put a little frowny face or exclamation mark icon next to the listing in their search results. If you saw that flag then you could just open the Google cached page and not have to worry about the evil popups.
I user Mozilla and Phoenix so I'm unbothered by all of this but I think it would be a great service for google to offer. If it was controversial then maybe Google could launch it among several similarl new "flags" for search results. They already have page size. They could add to that "image intensive", "not screen-reader accessible", "plugins used", and any number of other useful bits of information that I'm sure they could develop the technology to harvest when they index sites.
--Asa