Slashdot Mirror
Floaters are the New Pop-Ups
windowpain writes "A prior Slashdot article discussed the ever-increasing ability of pop-up ads to break through adblocking software. Now the New York Times (registration required) is reporting that pop-ups are pooped out, replaced by those annoying "floaters" that are even more resistant to conventional pop-up blocking software. From the article: 'Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated. In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.'"
With Mozilla/Firefox these new ads are actually not a problem. Just use a userContent.css file to block them.
For example, I found some that use divs with IDs, so I just added something like:
div#GF__p_0,
div#floatpop { display: none !important;}
And, poof, they're gone. Sometimes it can be difficult to figure out what to block, but the Webdeveloper extension can help quite a bit.
Solution Here.
Brand new, from what I hear.
More
The problem with popups is that clicking the back button was not enough, one had to clean up the mess -- sometimes a mess that would keep respawning itself. Floaters look superficially similar to popups, but floaters are completely contained within the window. That makes them just another (usually bad) design feature.
Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
I saw one of those on my OS X screen the other day. It actually looked like a Windows window. Kinda funny, really. Nostalgic for me anyway.
...lynx
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/24/technology/circu its/24popp.html?ex=1266987600&en=22bde7cc89dd70a5& ei=5090&partner=rssuserland
No Registration Link
I bet the rate of change for pup-up decline was correlated to the rate of change to Mozilla users until Microsoft SP2 was forced to offer pop up blocking. The floaters can have their day and again Mozy users have a slight advantage. If IE users get tired of it then I imagine the only company in an real danger would be Macromedia from people simply refusing to install advertisement generating software on their own machine.
There's a nice lil extension to firefox called "Remove this object" that gets rid of those stupid "floaters" (i call 'em div layers, only cos that's what they are).
Hey! Adware companies: Don't you get it? We don't want to see you. Go away and no, we don't want to see your little ads popping up in front of our eyes everytime we look for information. What kind of person thinks its OK to force others to see things they are not interested in. Do something with your life productive.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
I guess the question is if something like AdBlock can filter out these without getting a lot of false positives, making the browser render of a lot of pages incorrectly.
Martin
Flash ads flying around, climbing out of the page are the worst. Anyone know of a quick Firefox plugin to turn Flash animations off until I want to actually watch one?
The legitimate, non-advertising uses of these things are so limited (at least, compared to pop up windows), that the ad-blocking software will catch up with them in no time, and most people will lose nothing by deactivating the appropriate bits of javascript.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I think that at this point, it's obvious we need a "block javascript from this domain" extension or a "block javascript from this web folder" extension.
Same with iFrames (which is already implemented well in AdBlock)...
It's so obvious I'd be surprised if the functionality doesn't already exist.
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
I wish that the pop-over ads would only pop-over when I hovered over them... a bunch of ads from Dell I've seen seem to do that... and I appreciate that... it sits there like a banner, and when I hover over it, it expands and does it's nice flash ad... but the ones that do it 5 seconds after the sight loads (car adverts on CNN anyone?) I really hate... it's annoying and ensures that I will never consider watching it...
A bit of courtesy from the advertisers and I am willing to watch it if it catches my fancy, but if they throw it in my face, they ain't getting anything but rage from me.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
How many internet marketers would, if the technology were available, opt to have a physical hand come out of someone's monitor and slap them in the face until they read your ad?
I just wonder where some marketers draw the line.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Yeah, whatever these things are ultimately called, "floaters" seems appropriate for a number of reasons, most of them scatalogical.
But that's why you use a web browser (pretty much any browser that isn't IE) with a button that disables/enables Flash animations at a single click. Just one more reason to migrate to FireFox or whatever, I guess... (And if you must have IE compatibility for some reason, just overlay it with Avant.)
Free Sony PSPs from Gratis.
... should be flushed.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
... are the 'in-between' pages with advertising. You are reading an article, want to go from page 2 to 3 and boom, you end up on a completely different page.
On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.
Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated.
In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.
The floater ads, often using a computer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.
Floaters are one example of a variety of online ads known in the industry as rich media. Some variants include banner ads that expand to show graphics and streaming video when the cursor is waved over them; a tamer version packs the video and graphics into a static, or polite, banner. All have a common characteristic: they cannot be categorically blocked by existing technology.
To many, they are just as irritating as pop-up ads, if not more so. On the New Zealand cricket chat board, one user declared, "This form of advertising is without a doubt the most ridiculous and offensive form I have ever come across."
But as with pop-ups (before pop-up blockers), their appeal to advertisers is simple: they get people to click, usually transporting them to the advertiser's site. While static Web ads typically have "click through" rates of 0.5 percent of viewers, according to numerous industry studies, the rate for pop-ups and floaters is 3 percent to 5 percent, though some studies suggest that many of those clicks are attempts to get rid of the ad.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the sites on which such ads were most common in the year ended in December were three Microsoft sites - www.msn.com, www.msnbc.com and Hotmail - followed by espn.com and www.yahoo.com.
Although most advertisers and the sites where the ads appear seem happy with the use of the floater ads, recent research suggests problems. A study of 2,500 British Internet users released last month by OMD UK found that just as many Web users (44 percent) were annoyed with floaters as they were with pop-ups. Many major sites, like nytimes.com and www.msn.com, limit the number of times a person is shown such an ad. (At nytimes.com, the limit is once per visit to the site.)
"We want to do something that's informative and entertaining as opposed to being annoying," said Joanne Bradford, vice president and chief media revenue officer for msn.com. "That's our guiding principle." To that end, the company introduced on Feb. 1 a design that limited the number of ads on the main page. (Ms. Bradford would not say by how much.) The action, she noted, did prompt "a little bit of squawking" from advertisers.
Some are trying to figure out other ways to stop the onslaught. Mozilla, designer of the popular (and free) Web browser Firefox, which offers a pop-up blocker, is trying to block floater ads as well, but has so far been unsuccessful, said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "It really is an arms race," he said.
Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media, a company that sells advertising for more than 2,000 Web sites, said that even though he is a fan of the "rich media" ads, he warns that advertisers should understand that they cannot deluge people with the technology without consequence. "Just because you can do it doesn't make it a smart thing to do," he said.
I believe I speak for many when I say
"Who the Hell actually clicks on all the popups,popovers,floaters,ads and logos anyway?"
I can safely say the only time I click on an ad when online, is when my mouse slips?
I suppose it must be like spam. The percentage of suckers is incredibly low, but if ads are 10% of internet content, then you'll get a few hits.
Still though, I mean, what kind of person goes around saying "Oh! I do want a cheaper morgage!!" *CLICK*. Do any slashdotters have some amusing tales of such perpetually clueless lusers in their domains?
May the Maths Be with you!
Flashblock. Won't play them until you want.
Ultimately, what is required is for the browser (whichever one) to control what elements of CSS and Javascript sites are allowed to use.
Ergo; the user can simply dissallow CSS allowing flying elements ("float"-ing is a different thing, you see).
There needs to be a definite shift from the web-site having "control" unless the browser is patched to snatch it back, towards the web-page being permitted to do its thing within certain boundaries (boundaries that the user is in control of).
The rush to provide "web applications" runs contary to this; web pages are DATA, not programs and the further we go from that state, the more invasive mal-intentioned pages can be (example; ActiveX)
Quite aptly named if you ask me. Seeing as how both types are inherently distasteful...
Many of those floaters are created using flash, so use Flashblock to prevent them from showing.
Flashblock and AdBlock == good surfing experience.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
So what if it is a flash floater?
This time, the non-membership Slashdot version seeems to be:
Brilliant!
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I don't mind in-page ads of any sort nearly as much as I mind the new windows. The in-window ads aren't any more effort to work around, unless they block the content of the page (which is becoming more common, unfortunately).
The problem with popups wasn't the one new window.. It's playing Whack-A-Mole with the 32 pops spawned by that one.
- Due to firewall issues I have to play Live365 streams through a chain of their player, WinAmp and finally sound through WMP.
- I must have accidentally scroll-wheeled the WMP volume to zero.
- At the same time I hit that horrible "floater" ad with the periodic buzzing fly and (this part I don't quite get) the sound persisted even after the window had been closed.
So those events converge, and I'm getting stream to connect buffer and start playing but the only thing in my headphones was periodic buzzing! That took a little while to debug, I can tell you.What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I'd say the word poopovers describes them the best.
Don't these people look at any research, or are these just web developers with no actual marketing skills? Simple text based ads have been proven to be more effective than any form of internet advertisement, why do you think Google uses them?
I'm surprised nobody has come up with someting to hijack my printer and print out color ads for crappy vacations and stock purchase news. We get the faxes every day here at work
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Keep trying guys- my block lists will just get longer...
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Turn off Flash - I've never found a convincing argument to have it other than the odd well made animation - and these are few and far between, turning flash on and off should be a lot easier but aprt from that -it works.
My Portfolio
I hate floaters. You flush and flush and they never go down.
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
People keep saying "Firefox cures ads! Adblock and such!". Well the more popular firefox gets (I've used it since the Phoniex days and have noticed this as it's got more popular), the more people will try and break it. This is also the downside to being open source, while everyone can view the source code, it also means everyone can see the holes in it.
The more people that use firefox the more things like this will pop up, so we'll end up playing catch up over and over (and lets face it, the release yesterday proved how bad the update system is right now) untill people get sick of it and use a new browser which fixs this.
Now watch the post get 12 million replies saying "Yea like Usenet and Windows! Firefox is going to die hahahaha".
I like muppets.
All Marketing-related crap should be given sphincter-related names! Floaters, Sinkers, Double-Flushers, SBD's. Man, I wish they'd thought of this years ago.
the grandparent probably considers not installing flash as obvious.
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
Is there any way to use CSS to prevent a SCRIPT tag from getting executed on the basis of the SRC URL? "display: none" doesn't help when a script inserts its HTML somewhere else.
In the meantime, I'm trying to right-click to find where the various image parts are so I can add them to my list of IFRAME and SRC display-nones.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
These "floaters" remind me of that childish thing where someone leaps around thrusting their hands in front of your face going, "Not touching! Can't get mad!" Oh, yeah. That behaviour is really going to make me want to buy your product.
Since "floater" is (in England, anyway) slang for a turd that can't be flushed away, the name is at least appropriate.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
Use the "Flash click to view" extention. No more autoplaying Flash for me.
Hey, I can agree on a name! Poopovers it is!
Use Firefox.
Step two: Download and install prefbar.
Step three: Turn off Flash unless you really need it.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Isn't privoxy great? :-)
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
To fix popover ad's, stupid colors or layers they overlap so I can't read a page, I just click the the little user mode button. The background turns to white, all the text becomes black with the standard font and all the bad CSS crap gets turned off. And if I need it back I just click to turn Author mode back on.
I don't know if Fire Fox has this option but for those of you more involved with the project it would be a nice added feature.
Does anyone know for sure if Adblock for Firefox blocks pop-over/floating/whatever ads? I use it and havn't noticed any for a while. I also have ad free /. reading :)
hack a day
dhtml z-index?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Step four: Advertisers adapt
Step five: Profit
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
What a way to start a Friday morning.... glad it wasn't Monday. Floaters & popups? Wow. There's a mental image you don't want before a little Java!
Seriously, though.... We need some kind of legislation/senate bill to curb those doing these things. Perhaps a tax on Internet ads, I don't know. Not a popular suggestion, I know, but maybe it's the only way to stop neddless and RECKLESS advertising.
One advantage that pop-up ads (of one kind or another) have over mass emails is a generally reliable traceable route back to the originator.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
they'll notice you taking their wallet if you slap them first.
The problem is that many sites use this method legitimately - as a web designer its frustrating to see this getting abused. Yes the web shouldn't need flashy designs and and all this crap that allows advertisers to push their content but the fact is it does and designers are under allot of pressure by their bosses to do it. Even if everyone decided one day that enough was enough and turned off all css/javascript/flash and style and just read straight text, the advertisers would still find a way to get their noses in - article text would be full of random references to viagra and hosting solutions!
there are various extensions you can use to remove page elements with a single click but automatic filtering is going to need a bit more work, advertisers are going to have to learn that if they screw with the user then only the stupid and easily persuaded masses are going to buy their products.... oh wait.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Install FlashBlock/Flash-Click-To-Play or whatever the name is these days. Or simply avoid installing Flash.
I never needed Flash for anything. People keep telling me that you can do useful things in Flash, but I never actually seen it.
The lesson was: Users don't want to be pissed off by annoying crap adds and not how to find new ways to piss them off.
They should learn something from Googles adds.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Please don't make annoying ads, and force us to block them. I don't hate ads if they aren't jumping to my face.
After using Dan Pollock's hosts file for a few months, virtually all of that monkey business has disappeared. That, Firefox, and Adblock have made the web bearable for me.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
Floaters is an appropriate name for these types of ads.
They mention the click-through rates on these fuckers is significantly higher, but that it might be people trying to close them... Well, the obvious way to see how effective they are is to check conversion ratios. Savvy marketers would all be checking those... these ads aren't like porn banner-farm pop-ups, they're typically done by full-service marketing agencies -- in the end, they must be more effective, or we wouldn't have them.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Given the profanity I'm most likely to use when I encounter these things, calling them a "Floater" works nicely.
My general comment is "Well, if they're going to throw this s*** at me I'm not visiting this s***ty site again"
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
from the oh-good-i-was-getting-tired-of-actually-reading-co ntent dept.
This actually brings up an interesting point. Why bother combating the vehicle(s) guilty of making the reading of actual content difficult? Why not go after the sponsors, who use the vehicle(s) to hawk their goods? Allow me to elaborate.
Say I am in the business of hawking glow-in-the-dark laughing candlesticks or whatever other unmentionable abomination is being peddled via these floaters, overlays, or popovers. Instead of trying to stomp out the technology that is used in peddling these unmentionables, why not just come get me? Maybe slap me with a lawsuit. Better yet, hit me with a baseball bat in the parking lot?
I know the technology is always going to be ahead of the law, but putting up with such a nuisance should not be tolerated.
IANAL, but is this garbage considered free speech?
1. Install Firefox.
2. Enable popup blocking
3. Install Adblock
4. Install filter rule set for Adblock.
Every now and then, Adblock lets an ad through, but you can just right-click it and select "block ad", which augments your filter rule set. Now a real killer feature for Adblock would be for it to somehow filter ad indirection pages, i.e. you go to a page but are indirected through a page with a giant ad. Currently that page will look mostly empty because Adblock blocks the giant banner, but maybe Adblock could be improved to auto-skip to the next page... which should be easy to find because it is the redirect URL.
1) make a blacklist of all the sites that use that kind of technology. incorporate that blacklist in a browser-plugin and block those sites.
2) mail that site about how anoying those ads are and use a lot of html is that mail and a floater.
Privacy is terrorism.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I believe it would be in your companies best interest to institute a policy that your banner advertisments cannot make sounds unless a user is interacting with them.
You are currently running a banner add on your web site that is extremely anoying. It says "Swat the fly and get a free $250 gift certificate," and has a fly flying around and your mouse turns into a fly swatter when you mouse over it. The anoying thing is that it makes a buzzing sound even if you do not do anything.
Your web site auto refreshes at regular intervals. I usually leave my browser open on your site durig the day while I work and periodically check the headlines and read the articles. Imagine my surprise when, while I am working with my browser minimized, my computer suddenly begins to buzz. I use firefox for a browser, and usually have at least seven news sites open in tabs at once. It took me quite some time to find which site had an add that was playing the anoying buzzing sound.
Since I cannot prevent your site from auto refreshing, eventually that banner add will come back up. As a result, I am not going to be able to leave your site open today. That is a real shame because I relly enjoy your web site and read it daily. Unfortunately that annoying sound will drive me nuts and prevent me from getting my work accomplished.
Thank you for your time. I hope you will take my advice and change your advertising policy."
This was their response:
"Thanks for writing. We've been deluged with complaints about this ad. It was served by a third party advertiser, and we're working to track it down and remove it. If it does crop up again in the future, please don't hesitate to email us right away."
I was really surprised at the response. I guess since they are a legitimate news site (gonna get flamed for that), they cannot afford to have their advertisers driving their readers away from the site. Still I sent a similar email to abcnews.com for a similar ad a couple of months ago and the response was the exact oposite. I did not save the email but they basically told me to screw myself.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
Thanks for the heads up Captain Obvious.
In other news Michael Jackson is a little weird.
What are you, some sort of terrorist?
About a year ago, I said widespread Firefox adoption was bad and I was flamed for it, precisely for the reasons we're experiencing now. Part of the reason FF is so great is that no one writes software against FF, whether it be security holes or ads. I argued a year ago that widespread adoption would lead to advertisers taking measures to get around pop-up blocking and the problem and pop-ups decreasing as well since they were no longer effective. What will make FF truly not like IE is how quickly the team can respond to these new issues.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Best you can do is to stop visiting. CSS disabling floaters can cause people to using floaters for content or randomizing the name of the floater. Killing the divs might make people use a finite set of div names used for floaters and randomly using them for different parts of the page including the floaters and content. Blank them out, and you lose your content.
What's the next move then?
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Just get adblock for firefox (it's one of the top 5 extensions last I saw). Took me less than a day of normal browsing to block 99% of ads. It had been months since I last saw one until they other day when I was visiting drudgereport.com. Of course, that's probably the best place to start...there's enough ads there to knock out most of what you'll ever see.
/ads/ because that's a path for google ads, which I don't find anoying or intrusive so I let stay. I also don't block the slashdot ads that are generated by osdn, even though some of them ARE anoying.
Block these to start:
*/ads/*
ads.*
and you'll have at least half of all ads blocked. The only one I don't actualy use is
- AMW
"Floaters are the New Pop-Ups"
And orange is the new red.
-buf
link to a login page. It sure would be nice if when /, posted a story that purports to link to a news article, the link actually did lead to a news article.
People rise up in anger over the fact that advertisers are annoying us with advertisements. Advertisers could think "Hey, we are being annoying and people hate that, lets work on more subtle methods to advertise that don't offend". But no they find better ways to piss us off, and they think we will buy what ever they are selling.
Imagine walking down a street minding your own business. This guy suddenly pops out and hassles you. "You want to buy this? Check this out! Wow, you need to check this out!". He won't stop. When you finally get pissed off and punch the guy he is all surprised and doesn't understand why you won't buy his stuff. That sums up the online add industry.
When are they going to learn that they are just PISSING US OFF!
can someon provide a site for me that will actuly cause a popup. i havent seen a example yet.
the only thing that can get past my current set up is flash adds but they dont last very long.
120 chars is not bloody enough for a real sig!!! you bastards even count spaces!!!
I have a floater in the lower left quadrant of my left eye which is almost as annoying. I say "almost," because at least it doesn't keep trying to block what's directly in my field of vision.
I'm sure that advertisers are even now trying to mimic other physical maladies -- I can hardly wait for dizzyifiers, nauseators, and funnyboners.
Some sites like DrudgeReport and msn.com popup an add before you go to a link. This is done in javascript. Mozilla doesnt stop these.
... it explains them like the turds they are.
Adblock can also kill the floater by preventing it loading. (I prefer "floater" as its alternative meaning in British is that of a turd in water)
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Just turn off activex support in your browser and don't install flash.
* + I don't see spyware finding a way to put floaters in your browser.
* + If a site has floaters I can hit back and they all go away.
* - Floaters cover the information that you're trying to read and you have to close it out manually if you do want to read it.
* - A web application I manage uses floaters as modals instead of actuall windows for ease of programming and to avoid issues w/ blockers. Now I'm probably going to have to deal w/ floater blockers.
I wonder what it would be like if we worked on stories instead of flashy graphics in games. Would it be better to have a text based game where all the characters had personalities and could hold a conversation? Or is it better having lots of dumb things that don't talk to shoot at?
I believe it would be a natural extension of today's marketting techniques to use forms of pain and torture as a means of convincing people to buy your products and services. Clearly, being nice and friendly doesn't work any longer.
Let's just glance at the trends to see where they are going. With TV, they started with commercial spots which were actually convenient because if gave you the opportunity to get up and get a drink, make a sandwich or go use the bathroom. But lately, with the excessive amounts of commercials you have time to do all three of those things. Now they are corrupting our entertainment with product placement within the entertainment itself. Annoying...but livable since they have only the ability to make sounds and video so it kind of limits what they can do. (Though I make predictions that they will begin adding ear-drum-peircing tones to the beginning and end of each commercial to take advantage of the new pain marketting techniques.)
The same generally applies to radio where the commercial air time obviously swarfs the amount of entertainment air time. But again, ear-drum shattering tones, not unlike the Emergency Broacast System tests, will mark the beginnings and ends of advertisments on the radio.
With computers and internet, we have suffered greatly from the creative genius of marketters who clearly illustrate they have no moral boundaries. They spam us, we block them, they find ways around the blocks and keep spamming. Now what marketting genius thinks it is a good idea to skirt what amounts to security measures in order to get your advertisment through? In some places it's a criminal offense to ignore a "No Soliciting" sign. How about climing over a security fence in order to place a handbill on your door? Is it okay? Or what about picking the lock of your back door (a clear invitation since you have a back door, it must mean you want someone to come in through it right?) in order to stick something on your refridgerator (and then count all the items in your food storage to see what you've been eating and buying)? Would this be acceptable? No, guess not. Marketters would think it's equally ridiculous...or would they..? (Do you think I just gave them a bad idea? D'oh!)
I have proposed this idea in the past and I believe I got some support for the idea at the time but now I'm almost ready to start the push myself. Let's make a "mark" in the minds of the consumers out there.
I think we should hire some people to go around and beat up random strangers on the street. The advertising comes in when you script the ass-kickin' with commercial messages. Timing is crucial. For example, if I were advertising Viagra, a kick in the crotch should happen at exactly the moment the product name is mentioned. This works directly as the word "Viagra" will be stuck in the mind of the recipient for a LONG LONG time. And indirectly, as you see people holding their damaged "goods" and you ask them what happened, they can simply answer "Viagra" and the message will be clear.
I have considered many ways in which pain would be an effective marketting tool and the scenario above is just one example.
Popups are for wimps.
I'm no developer and I don't usually peeked into webpages code, but I guess that the "nexgen" of add blockers should "sniff" all the javascript passed to the browser(s) and sort it out if its an popup/floater/whatever piece of garbage or if it's something actualy usefull for the browsing.
To sum it up: Opera (javascript off), then Firefox, then (gasp!) IE.
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
That's the great thing about Firefox. It adapts nearly as quickly as advertisers.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I've made quite a few of these things (not for ad purposes).
Like popup windows, it's a shame this feature is used for evil, but they're equally easy to disable. here is an example. Ignore the text inside, and please don't comment on it.
Just find any tags with position:absolute and display is not "none" and you're golden. Just make it like popup blockers, where you have to instantiate the change from display:none;position:absolute; to display:block;position:absolute AFTER the page loads.
Latewire
For those who don't know what all this is about: Here's an example.
If you happened upon nj.com in the last month, you might have noticed a clucking penguin waddling across the computer screen, stumbling over text as it promoted a local utility company.
On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the
omputer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.
If you do not like "floaters" or ad on a web site, just don't visit it.
I agree that popups are bad because they grab your screen real estate, they go outside the content provider space into your personal space.
But floaters do not use any of your personal space. When you visit a website, you are giving the content provider some space on your screen. In return it provides you with content of interest. If in addition, in the same space you are allowing him to use, it provides ads, just live with it.
And if you don't like the way he serve ads, then just leave the site.
If a web site become too anoying, I either complain to the site operator or just leave the site and not return to it anymore.
We don't need to escalade the arm race against ads... We already have way to disable ads images ans popups. We also have a way of saying to content provider that the way they display ads annoys us. I believe that's more than enough!
You could also block *.swf, and the domains of a *few* very prolific ad serving companies.
My only wish would be that Adblock became part of stock firefox. When installing or maintaining 1000+ desktop machines, it's a pain not to have Adblock in the basic browser.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The companies that create these intrusive ads are undermining the interests of their clients, both the advertisers and the web sites that run advertisements. As this continues, more and more users will start to turn off Flash, Java, and Javascript, and block ads entirely with products such as Privoxy. The net effect will be reduced advertising revenue for everybody and more good web sites going under.
I anticipate that the next generation of web browsers will include whitelist capabilities that allow users to enable these features only for "well behaved" web sites that refuse to allow intrusive advertising.
No Flash. Java mostly blocked. No pop up allowed. People speaks about a recrudescence of pop up and floater and whatever, but really, if you shut every of those annoying extension down (and frankly they are mostly used for annoying effect) then your (browsing) life get "better". As for web site which REQUIRE you to have flash/java/shocked/whatever then either they are important and then I bring up iexplore.exe, or I jsut ignore them and go to another site to browse.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Toward the end of the article the author stated that they are also called popovers, overlays, ect. I like floaters, because no matter hard much you flush, the damn turds never go down. But on a more serious note...one should be asking are pop-ups, spyware, and other annoyances legal or is it hacking? Especially if the meathod is coming through an unwanted program that was installed without the user's knoweledge. In criminal justice law this is the equvialent to breaking and entering, vandalism, sabutage, and a whole other arm's list of realted crimes. The fact is that companies that participate in these activities are more than just guilty of agressive marketing, but are guilty of fraud, vandalism, false advertising. I think that a consumer's union should be founded to boycott companies that such meathods as advertising bait: it's disgusting, distastful, and inappropriate. The fact that my nine year old sister can get on the net and type in http://www.pbs.org or nasa.gov and get a popup or floater advertising porn (via some undected spyware residing on the system)is disturbing on many levels. What's next?
Don't you long for the days before corporations took over the internet? I mean, sure HTML 1.0 kinda sucked, but when it was just us geeks trying to share information, everything was so much cleaner. When it suddenly became chic to be on "the net" advertisers came--spam, pop-ups, spyware, etc. Death, Taxes, and Advertising. It's like we're already in hell....wait a minute...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
[...] I'd very much like to see an over-the-Internet face-slapping technology developed.
Easy, if you replace face-slapping with electro-shocking.
If you thought that you could get away with using rubber gloves, you are dead wrong: this is a circumvention, and you'll be hit by the DMCA!
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
My solution to ads is like carpet bombing.
I keep adblock running. Whenever I find an annoying ad, I ban the whole domain (a la http://*.doubleclick.net).
With most of the big advertisers banned, ads are down to a minimum.
I started to do this mostly because this intellitext freak that turn sites into advertising minefields.
No tracking scripts either with that technique.
GPG 0x1B479C78
You could block *.swf, but there's a lot of valid uses of it, including site navigation. Blocking *.swf would render some sites completely unusable.
If you don't mind editing system files (who at Slashdot does?) you can always add this list to your host file:
Mike's Ad Blocking Hosts file. That'll block them for even IE.
- AMW
Ads too annoying? Change your information sources. This has already happened: remember that we used to love Altavista, then everybody switched over to Google because it was ad-free... We used to love portals, then they went ad-crazy, and we switched to a number of different tools (aggregators, google, etc). Sometimes down the line, one has to think "Is the information on this site worth all the hassle?". The more they push ads down our throat, the more we will look for (or build) alternatives... just think about RIAA's "success" against p2p.
-- Let's go Viridian.
Yeah Homer, Fight the Power!!!
My trivially simple solution is not to use those sites again. Ever.
:)
And just to be on the safe side I add an entry in my hosts file to redirect the offending URLs to a page on my local webserver which reminds me that these people are scum.
Yes I am intolerant of crap and yes that makes me happy
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Just put
in a user stylesheet. And then realise that there are lots of sites that use this legitimately, and take it back out again.The crux of the matter is that dynamically positioning things on screen is not a reliable indicator that something is an advert, and that restricting pages from doing so will stop many legitimate things from being possible.
As far as I know, nobody has come up with a way to identify these things reliably. CSS "flying elements", as you call them, encompass a whole range of different things, only one of which is advertising.
That I cut back on the fat in my diet, that usually eliminates floaters.
Turning off Flash is great solution. Hopefully the annoying uses of Flash will lead to more focused attention on SVG development. I'm all for open standards, but Flash is so ubiquitous right now that I wonder if SVG usage will grow beyond a threshold of public awareness. We need a popular application for SVG like there is Firefox/Mozilla for the browser world.
Linux at home
>I can honestly say any of them would happily double click a landmine just to see what happens.
"KABOOM! You step on a land mine. --More--"
"You movements are slowed slightly because of your load"
---- Take the Space Quiz!
Fortunately, AdBlock and Proxomitron (sorry - can't always spell that word) support filters based on REGEXP (Regular Expression)
/banner/ , /includes/ , /adverts/ will kill locally-hosted third-party content fairly easily. Once you have a good lexicon of terms used by ad-servers you'll kill nearly all ads automatically, then you can just add any others manually.
For instance, a filter in AdBlock which is simply
Whats also great is that REGEXP can't be circumvented by the advertiser moving to a new domain unless thay also change the entire structure of their system.
As a system builder I support Firefox as it keeps my customers PCs secure. AdBlock's ability to remove annoying content encourages them to use Firefox over IE and consequently helps me out a great deal.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
...we should be able to charge the advertisers for their use of our eyes. We own our eyes. They belong to us and any use of our eyes against our own wishes (ie, advertising free life) should be able to earn us money. After all, this is capitalist America where the dollar is all that counts!!! Let's start invoicing advertisers for the smount of times they use our eye's services. Right now... I'm not seeing any ads on /. thanks to my /etc/hosts file redirecting all ad servers to a web server on my intranet. :)
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I vote for 'floaters'. It's an accurate description on many different levels and covers the full field of various characteristics of these ads.
It just goes to show you: the Internet wants to be free.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I'm not familiar with any way to do this (presently) - but a good start would be to prevent off-main-site content from being able to make such floater divs. If only the main site creating the ads can create these annoying ads - then we know exactly who to complain to, and who's endorsing them.
Another option along these lines would be to have some sort of declaration that prevents this within included tags, e.g.
<noasshole> their advertisement here </noasshole>
- which would restrict all sorts of javascript tricks and css crap (and </noasshole>'s).
The problem then becomes that advertisers wouldn't advertise at such a site - so it would have to be a universal bandaid, or the good sites would just drop like flies. Anyway, you have an agreement with your advertisers - so you could just as easily make the agreement specify such terms and protect yourself, this would just be a technology backup.
This (should) already be a nonissue for iframes, since they shouldn't be able to render outside of their frame - but there are some tricks they too can use (parent.blah) - depending on the permissions afforded them, which should pretty universally never ever ever be afforded them.
So, in summary - damnit, no solution.
cyn, free software and *nix operating systems enthusiast.
OK... While we are whining about morphed pop-overs, so whose idea was it to do this whole mouseover text thing?
If I mouseover an unordered link list, odds are text will pop up and be EXACTLY the colored link text that was mouseovered, only a few degrees off in one direction or another. Typically, like this post, this verbiage adds no information to the discussion, and hides other information by appearing. I move these retarted mouseover tags be swept away with the rest of the poor-idea-clutter upon our next HTML housekeeping standards meeting.
I've been known to click on non-offensive ads that are of interest, usually related to things I need at work. "Hmm, another supplier of SATA based storage servers, you say?..."
That said, I click on ads only extremely rarely and NEVER on annoying ones. Interesting, really, as I'm one of those folks who is really only reached by 'net adversising - I watch no TV (cant't stand the ads and the drivel) and listen only to non-commecial radio (similar reasons).
I wonder how many more people there are who don't mind inoffensive, low key advertising and may actually view it as useful, but avoid anything more intrusive? I suspect "a lot".
What I want to know is why ads are served from a central host? Does it have to do with keeping the web sites honest? Could a website say that it's getting 5x the number of hits and fake the ad server into sending it extra banners, thus driving up their ad revenue? Also, my sister worked for double-click for a while (I almost disowned her, but she did hate it), and she told me that they do all sorts of logic and tracking on the ads, which ads benefit for them to serve directly. I guess it would also allow them to determine what kinds of pages a person is going to and send relevant ads no matter what the current host is... any ideas?
Of course that can be changed by javascript, but there should be something to do about that too. Needs some thinking though.
I use Mike's Ad Blocking HOSTS file, available at this link. So far, it hasn't blocked any sites that I needed to access. It's regularly updated to reflect newly-discovered or newly-minted ad servers. Consider offering $5 to Mike for his efforts. (Yes, I am a Mike, but not the one who makes this hosts file. I will, however, be happy to accept $5.)
Some marketoids actually view annoying ads as the best, on the theory that they stand out. I really hope they're not right.
I know I've refused to deal with companies before because of their advertising, but I'm not sure the majority of folks will.
As many have pointed out advertisers will go beyond annoying to reach that .01% that will buy. This is nothing new.
My problem is that javascript gives the website control over your browsing experience (also mentioned), and I think this is a good thing. Popups can be a useful way to show some information without leaving a page and having to hit back or find a link. They were until advertisers abused them.
Now we have dhtml, which allows for some really smooth stuff like divs/iframes that act like windows. "Floaters" can be really useful too, and I hope they dont get blasted out of existance nondiscrimately.
The best thing about css+javascript+dhtml is that its not unreasonable to make a multiplatform "application" that many people can use. This is very useful in internet mapping (not the mapquest type, the GIS type). Previously mapping was restricted to desktop applications, but now people are coming out with better "applications" that can be used on the web without plugins being installed.
I like some of the solutions, where the adblocking will see the 3rd party address and block the div. We can only hope that worthwile sites see the value in interesting and nonintrusive ads (google ads). But even major companies like the Times cant figure out that free registration hurts them.
I guess we will see, but ultimately I think its a market driven thing, and the market will adapt to the new technologies.
"how can they call it a MINE if everything here is THEIRS?!?!" -Straight Jacket
These types of ads are never as annoying as pop-up windows. You can always get rid of these floaters just by closing the tab or window the web site is in, or just hitting the back button. Pop-up windows sometimes appeared under your browser to haunt you later, opened many windows that needed to be closed separately, etc.
By forcing advertisers to use this type of in-window advertising, I believe pop-up blockers have accomplished their mission and put the control over the browsing experience back in the user's hands. You can now just hit back and forget about visiting the site if you decide the content isn't worth dealing with the forest of floaters.
I believe that web site designers have a legitimate right to control the look and feel of their page, as long as they stay within the expected bounds given to them by the user. The use of floaters keeps them within this expected window. If a site decides to use these floaters and it annoys the users enough not to look at their content, then it is up to the users to go to alternate sources and the designers to realize their site is horrible when their visitors never bother wading through the floaters to see the content. This is an open internet after all, if you don't want to go through the floaters it is now easy to hit back and get your data from another source by selecting another search result, an alternate link, etc.
As I read through NY times about how the pop-ups are things of the past, firefox shows now familiar warning: Firefox prevented this site from opening a popup window!!!!
You are correct that many/most that have blocked pop-ups will be hostile towards the advertiser. On the other hand, like an organism, these pop-ups thrive by exploiting a territory with less competition, they standout more because less clever pop-ups do not appear, and because you really, really notice them since you had thought you had them blocked. The end result is a highly memorable product. Not everyone will punish them for their intrusive behavior so they accomplish exactly what they wanted.
If pop-ups weren't effective, why so much work to circumvent pop-up blockers? I suspect most people (most still use IE), don't have pop-up blocking enabled.
Since some percentage of viewers buy the advertiser's product... well then to quote Walt Kelly and Pogo "We has met the enemy, and he is us!"
Letter To Iran
Or you could just use Linux.
I always thought a floater was caused by inadequate flushing?
When a passenger of the foot, hooves in sight, tootel the horn trumpet melodiously
"Once you have a good lexicon of terms used by ad-servers you'll kill nearly all ads automatically"
Well, this method doesn't work very well for spam email, does it? Why don't Proxomitron and ad blocker have the same issues as blocking email spam? Like false positives?
DAILY ROTATION
It's about time this practice
was stopp ************** tising
is intrus * FIRST POST * and it's
destroyin ************** of my
favourite sites are now completely
unreadable.
maybe someone will write a personality plugin into nethack....
C'mon, it's not like advertisers are human. :P
These new "floater" ads can be stamped out if you have the right functionality in the web browser itself.
:-) I wonder why Mozilla 1.7.x and Firefox 1.x doesn't offer this level of blocking control without having to do a lot of manual configuration with third-party add-ons.
I'm currently running MySoft Technology's Maxthon (formerly MyIE2) shell program for Internet Explorer 5.x and later, which has a very powerful function called AD Hunter. AD Hunter not only blocks mostly pop-up windows, but also the vast majority of "floating" ads, Flash animated ads, a large number of online static ads and even allows you to block ActiveX objects!
I don't know why these people submit reg-free links to nytimes... guess some people never learn.
Anyway, here's the article text:
IF you happened upon nj.com in the last month, you might have noticed a clucking penguin waddling across the computer screen, stumbling over text as it promoted a local utility company.
On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.
On the Web, the floater's time has come.
Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated.
In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.
The floater ads, often using a computer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.
Floaters are one example of a variety of online ads known in the industry as rich media. Some variants include banner ads that expand to show graphics and streaming video when the cursor is waved over them; a tamer version packs the video and graphics into a static, or polite, banner. All have a common characteristic: they cannot be categorically blocked by existing technology.
To many, they are just as irritating as pop-up ads, if not more so. On the New Zealand cricket chat board, one user declared, "This form of advertising is without a doubt the most ridiculous and offensive form I have ever come across."
But as with pop-ups (before pop-up blockers), their appeal to advertisers is simple: they get people to click, usually transporting them to the advertiser's site. While static Web ads typically have "click through" rates of 0.5 percent of viewers, according to numerous industry studies, the rate for pop-ups and floaters is 3 percent to 5 percent, though some studies suggest that many of those clicks are attempts to get rid of the ad.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the sites on which such ads were most common in the year ended in December were three Microsoft sites - www.msn.com, www.msnbc.com and Hotmail - followed by espn.com and www.yahoo.com.
Although most advertisers and the sites where the ads appear seem happy with the use of the floater ads, recent research suggests problems. A study of 2,500 British Internet users released last month by OMD UK found that just as many Web users (44 percent) were annoyed with floaters as they were with pop-ups. Many major sites, like nytimes.com and www.msn.com, limit the number of times a person is shown such an ad. (At nytimes.com, the limit is once per visit to the site.)
"We want to do something that's informative and entertaining as opposed to being annoying," said Joanne Bradford, vice president and chief media revenue officer for msn.com. "That's our guiding principle." To that end, the company introduced on Feb. 1 a design that limited the number of ads on the main page. (Ms. Bradford would not say by how much.) The action, she noted, did prompt "a little bit of squawking" from advertisers.
Some are trying to figure out other ways to stop the onslaught. Mozilla, designer of the popular (and free) Web browser Firefox, which offers a pop-up blocker, is trying to block floater ads as well, but has so far been unsuccessful, said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "It really is an arms race," he said.
Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media, a company t
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Since "floater" is (in England, anyway) slang for a turd that can't be flushed away, the name is at least appropriate.
Here in the States "floater" is sometimes used to describe a silent, but overly noxious, fart.
"I launched a floater at the dinner table and I thought Grandma was gonna puke."
Privoxy
Works great with Squid. Hasn't been maintained in a while, however.
iSKUNK!
because websites are designed by professionals while emails are written by anyone!!! Seriously - emails reflect human speech in all its diversity. viagra might be legitimately mentioned in an email but what web designer would include crucial parts of his site in a folder called /adverts/ ?
REGEXP is better suited to adblocking than spamblocking
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
If I visit someone's site, and that is how they decide to generate revenue then it is their choice (their site). The only time this is a problem is if: 1) the pop-up opens up 30 other pop-ups, 2) the pop-up is annoyingly persistant, 3) everytime you go to another part of that website it brings another pop-up (even though you already have one opened, 4) if it installs malware.
Otherwise, in reality, an organization needs to do what they can do to stay up and running - if you do not like it---don't go to their site (again, assuming you were not dragged there.)
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Site navigation is not a valid use. Links are a valid navigation method, plugins and other shit are not.
Blocking *.swf would render some sites completely unusable.
This is true, but by definition those sites weren't worth visiting in the first place.
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Another possibility is that people are not good at finding the more legitimate stuff they want and end up clicking links to dodgy sites. That's just user error. You'd think with errors being so annoying people would learn.
How do you know your buddy surfs porn? Ask him if popups or floaters are a big problem for him.
Firefox seems not to honor my /etc/hosts file (WinXP) for much of anything.
I added ads.osdn.com to it, and it happily displays everything from there.
I was just reading this article and pondering whether an elephant-gun solution to this problem might spell the end for the webplication arena; you kill off the ability to make those applications work if you cripple css or JS.
I would like to see Firefox enable some more dynamic controls for pages that I load. There are several technologies that I want to use most of the time, but I would like the ability to override.
Such as:
- stop/disable animated gifs. If I find a site annoying, let me stop the damn animated images. These really suck when I'm trying to read a long article, and a monkey is jumping around in an image at the border of the text.
- disable audio output. A www site should almost never be able to output audio. The default should be mute, perhaps with a popup saying "this site wants the speaker. allow it?".
- disable javascript for a site. This should take care of the "floaters", and a lot of other annoying js behavior.
Firefox seems not to honor my /etc/hosts file (WinXP) for much of anything.
I added ads.osdn.com to it, and it happily displays everything from there.
Did you reboot? It won't work unless you reboot. Otherwise, make sure that IE is blocking them, if it's not, something else is wrong and it's not Firefox.
- AMW
First, we need to get Flash under user control. This may require implementing an open-source Flash player, or beating hard on Macromedia. Flash animations need to respond to a "block all images from this site" right-click. All animations should come up static, dimmed, and silent, requiring user action to activate them. This keeps the annoyance level down.
Then we need to make page ownership hierarchical. If a page opens another window, the new window is considered a child of the parent window. When the parent window closes, so must the child.
Further, child windows should be restricted to the area of the parent window. They must be in front of the parent, and they must have some minimal overlap. (Restricting them to the parent window frame is probably too restrictive, but requiring some overlap means they can't move freely around the screen.)
My cousin Johnny worked in advertizing for a while. His company had a proposal out at one point to a company that made dog snacks. The idea was to include a whole lot of doorbell sound effects in the TV spot, which would target the commercial so that anyone who had a dog would go nuts when it came on. That'd get their attention, right?
Happily, the client chose not to annoy a huge share of its potential market.
Which, leading me back to Web ads, only makes me feel a little grateful that they haven't generally used sounds. (The equivalent level of obnoxiousness might be the faux Windows dialog ads: "Your computer may be infected. Click YES to download our spyware!")
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Not always simple. My bank began these annoying ads recently. So my "simple" choice here is to either cease doing online banking (not a zero-cost proposition), switch banks (not a zero cost proposition), or put up with the ads. IMO this amounts to a unilateral and material change of relationship by my bank, which I have a problem with because I was never consulted. Yes, I have a choice, but it's not so easy that I'm whistling "don't worry be happy" while I'm mulling over my next move.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
I've been using opera forever because of the quickness with which I can resolve the problem.
If I hit a site with one of these pop ups I hit the following keys. F12 -> u -> F5. Done.
When I get time I'll look into writing macros that do the same thing for firefox.
-Nuke the moon
Other browsers need to start adopting site specific preferences, they really are a great feature. For example when the IDN problem was first mentioned I setup my main banking sites to use slightly bigger fonts. If I ever browse a spoofed version it will be immediately obvious since the fonts will be smaller again.
Check out this screenshot for a better idea of how these work. You mau also want to have a look at the Omniweb feature page.
Aren't floaters what you get in your toilet after having eaten a lot of roughage? Ick!
For ready-to-consume solutions, look up AdZap and others in google.
This, for instance, can help.
HTH
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I dropped a couple floaters in the pot today :)
One of our head tech guys related his buddy's experience from the corporate world.
After spending half a day disinfecting the Anna Kourknova (?) virus from a department, he was called back in a couple oh hours.
Same user.
When asked why, he explained, "I didn't get to see the picture"
hawk
I found two in my toilet this morning!
There's a problem with the crash tests, though.
.
Most of them are done by slamming a car into a concrete wall, which grossly skews the data in favor of small cars that wouldn't survive a real collision and against larger cars that would.
A more accurate test would be to slam it into a ton or ton and a half block, perhaps on locked tires.
While I'm at it: I never get to use coupons. It's rare that, even with doubling, they reduce the price down to that of the generics . .
hawk
Sorry, my fault. I didn't realize that pop-up blockers were looking at HTML source and refusing to run certain types of code, making the next logical step for the enemy to just change their code to something more obfuscated.
I thought that pop-up blockers actually prevented a window from opening that wasn't a direct result of an explicit user action. For example, a window that opens as a result of an onLoad event handler cannot open, but a window that opens as a result of an onClick event handler is allowed to open. At least that's the way I thought they were doing it.
Now that I find that simple (and juvenile) obfuscation gets around most blockers, I'm shocked and amazed that I enjoyed a period of YEARS without being bothered by pop-ups on my Mac, first in Chimera, renamed to Camino, and then in Safari. Now suddenly they're back with a vengeance and I'm pissed.
Just my USD 0.02
RP
Then, a couple years from now when (please please please) SVG actually starts to be a standard in browsers, we'll see SVG advertisements that not only move around but ANIMATE.
Then we'll be forced to implement crap like "Only allow SVG from the sites I authorize" etc etc... It's an arms race. I prefer to deal with the issue by not browsing to sites which choose to run ads that pollute my browsing experience.
Are you referring to the Associated Press which supplies many of the articles to Fox News, CNN, MSN, and MSNBC? If so, I definitely agree with you.
Go to http://www.lashampoo.net/unix/stopADVbanners.css.t xt and copy and paste the entire page into a text editor. Save and install (instructions are in the file, commented out with the usual #). This version I have is much older than this link but I've added a few urls to it so it's still working for me fine.
Kills most ads dead, including flash and other "popovers". You can edit it to your liking to include more blocked hosts anytime. Works with most browsers and most OS's.
If you use OSX/Safari, go to Window: Activity to view the urls of every item on any page, including the ones this CSS blocks and of course the ones that might get past from time to time. Add them as required by editing the text file.
Other OS's/browsers may have a similar ability (not just view source, although it does help sometimes to do that) but you will have to check that out yourself or perhaps if someone knows they could reply to this post and let us all in on it.
I have noticed a few sneak by once every few weeks, but for the most part it's working good for me and has for years. Add new offenders as they are discovered and it's pretty simple and painless.
Occasionally you will find a page where you need to view a button that is blocked (eg the "Download" button for Shockwave 10 won't show up with this enabled) so just disable temporarily and use as if you were John Q Public. Most of the time it doesn't affect "normal" content at all, or put another way I don't miss whatever I'm not seeing in the least.
Floater Ads, the Cousins to Pop-Ups, Evade the Blockers
By JONATHAN MILLER
Published: February 24, 2005
IF you happened upon nj.com in the last month, you might have noticed a clucking penguin waddling across the computer screen, stumbling over text as it promoted a local utility company.
On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the "Lord of the Rings" film trilogy.
On the Web, the floater's time has come.
Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated.
In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.
The floater ads, often using a computer's Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.
Floaters are one example of a variety of online ads known in the industry as rich media. Some variants include banner ads that expand to show graphics and streaming video when the cursor is waved over them; a tamer version packs the video and graphics into a static, or polite, banner. All have a common characteristic: they cannot be categorically blocked by existing technology.
To many, they are just as irritating as pop-up ads, if not more so. On the New Zealand cricket chat board, one user declared, "This form of advertising is without a doubt the most ridiculous and offensive form I have ever come across."
But as with pop-ups (before pop-up blockers), their appeal to advertisers is simple: they get people to click, usually transporting them to the advertiser's site. While static Web ads typically have "click through" rates of 0.5 percent of viewers, according to numerous industry studies, the rate for pop-ups and floaters is 3 percent to 5 percent, though some studies suggest that many of those clicks are attempts to get rid of the ad.
According to Nielsen/NetRatings, the sites on which such ads were most common in the year ended in December were three Microsoft sites - www.msn.com, www.msnbc.com and Hotmail - followed by espn.com and www.yahoo.com.
Although most advertisers and the sites where the ads appear seem happy with the use of the floater ads, recent research suggests problems. A study of 2,500 British Internet users released last month by OMD UK found that just as many Web users (44 percent) were annoyed with floaters as they were with pop-ups. Many major sites, like nytimes.com and www.msn.com, limit the number of times a person is shown such an ad. (At nytimes.com, the limit is once per visit to the site.)
"We want to do something that's informative and entertaining as opposed to being annoying," said Joanne Bradford, vice president and chief media revenue officer for msn.com. "That's our guiding principle." To that end, the company introduced on Feb. 1 a design that limited the number of ads on the main page. (Ms. Bradford would not say by how much.) The action, she noted, did prompt "a little bit of squawking" from advertisers.
Some are trying to figure out other ways to stop the onslaught. Mozilla, designer of the popular (and free) Web browser Firefox, which offers a pop-up blocker, is trying to block floater ads as well, but has so far been unsuccessful, said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation. "It really is an arms race," he said.
Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media, a company that sells advertising f
Is at NBC's main page. Everytime I go there it's a Casino floating ad that I can't seem to get rid of. I'm used to these types of things on smaller companies, but not on a major network like NBC. Anyone else have this problem? (I'm using IE)
> Fortunately, AdBlock and Proxomitron (sorry - can't always spell that word) support filters based on REGEXP (Regular Expression)
You got it right. I'm always spelling it Proximitron myself. Anyway, Proxomitron's matching language is not regex (lowercase it, it ain't an acronym), it's actually its own thing that's more specialized for matching tokens, such as operators that collapse whitespace. It's a little hard to learn, but it's not too bad. Personally I'd find perl6 regexes to be perfect, but I'll be waiting a long time for those.
I use proxomitron not to block ads, but to insert large quantities of javascript into a web app I use at work, that among several other things, logs certain forms to the filesystem for later processing, and adds keyboard accellerators to the commonly used buttons and fields on the page. It's a great way to hack on a web app you otherwise aren't allowed to mess with.
As to anyone else using Proxomitron for the first time: you can and probably should turn off the GUI theme. It's kind of a wry joke on the usefulness of themeability.
I am no longer wasting my time with slashdot
At least Website floaters aren't as annoying as floaters in your eyes...
buffering...
It's strange, but I've yet to find any compelling reason to click 'there'...
(I have experienced a whole two of these floaters in the last couple of months, though. Must be time to downgrade my browser again, or switch to Lynx!)
You must think in Russian.
For some reason I had this nightmarish image of advertisers combining pop-ups and/or "floaters" with EULAs:
"Use of this website implies reading and agreeing to XYZ Corp's End-User License Agreement (EULA), which dictates leaving pop-up advertisements open. By closing this advertisement, you agree that you have read the alternate _No-Popup_End-User_License_Agreement_ and to be bound by the terms and conditions contained therein. These terms include (but are not limited to) acceptance of the installation by XYZ Corp of various third-party tracking software onto your computer without your interaction..."
Unfortunatly it doesn't work for Flash animations.
The trick to getting rid of Flash ads with NukeAnything is to right-click just off the edge of the ad. This avoids bringing up the Flash menu, but you are still within the container for the Flash object.
It would be nice though if a future version had the ability to insert the "Remove this object" command into the Flash menu, or if there were a way to execute the command without going throught the right click menu (eg. alt+click or something).
Ideology is for ideots.
I actually e-mailed him concerning this article, and got a reponse from him equally as condescending.
POST IT!
POST IT!
POST IT!
POST IT!
POST IT!
So get websites to sell pay per view ads, and then use a blocker that loads the ad but doesn't display it. That way the website creator gets his money, and you get fewer ads. Who care what happens to the advertisers.
Given the time it takes my browser to load some sites I know that I am doing the second part of that allready. (yes I know that I can stop, but I just stated the reasons to not do so).
Of course we are! So, now I have been called a thief by the cable industry for using a Tivo, by the Ad industry for using a popup blocker, by the RIAA for ripping my own CD's, by the MPAA for backing up my DVD's.
I am surprised I am not in jail yet! Of course, they are accusing me of being of thief while I am engaging in perfectly legal activities.
On an older computer (really old) I altered the HOST file to block all ads (known at the time). The Host file was about 1 meg in size.
... ... ...
I filled my HOST file with entries like this:
127.0.0.1 01.sharedsource.org
127.0.0.1 0190-dialer.com
127.0.0.1 03.sharedsource.org
127.0.0.1 05.sharedsource.org
127.0.0.1 09.sharedsource.org
127.0.0.1 0websearch.com
127.0.0.1 10.xxor.biz
127.0.0.1 10016.searchmiracle.com
127.0.0.1 123count.com
127.0.0.1 123greetings.com
127.0.0.1 123greettings.com
127.0.0.1 123invention.com
127.0.0.1 xrenoder.com
127.0.0.1 xxor.biz
127.0.0.1 xxxod.net
127.0.0.1 xxxwwwjjjhd.20forfree.com
127.0.0.1 yeah.com
127.0.0.1 yo.netster.com
127.0.0.1 your.com
127.0.0.1 your.wishbone.com
This way when even a floater or popup add was called it was directed back to my computer to look for the file to load.
Worked extermly well. Blocked all Ad related cookies as well.
The one issue is that it took some extra time to load and process the 1 meg HOST file. After the intial load MS Internet Explorer worked normally. I would not mind testing it out on a really fast computer and see how it works. A site that would automaticly update a new HOST file with the known ads would be a perfect aid.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Floaters are the best! Especially the ones that won't flush, whoo-hoo that's a great day!
We completely blocked popups. For a while. I've gotten several today in Firefox. I think it's now going to be an arms race between pop-up makers and pop-up closers.
We've written spam filters that block spam. This fueled an even bigger arms race between spam senders and spam deleters.
Are we going to do the same with 'floaters'? I'm not sure they're going to be as easy to block, since they are essentially a part of the page content.
I think it's time we started moving away from technological approaches that lead to arms races, where we just end up with even more irritating spam (misspelled, randomly spaced) and still have popups (they just use nasty tricks in JavaScript).
How about we move to a new approach? I've just naturally done this for a while. When I go to your site, and can't see it because some huge thing starts floating across the screen, I go to another site. I'm not going to try to figure out how to close the thing. I'm not going to wait for it to go away. I'm going to leave your site. And if it happens enough, I'm eventually going to stop going to your site, since I can't ever see it.
If more people simply refused to put up with this crap, maybe we wouldn't have problems. They might be making more money off these irritating ads, but the increased cost per ad, times the 0 visitors they'd get, wouldn't equal what they got with less annoying ads.
Technology might buy us some time. But I think it's time we looked to something other than technological hacks to solve this sort of problem.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I don't actually mind ads!
But let me explain.
I don't mind *static*, magazine/newspaper-style ads that sit there in the side column (these can get annoying with T and A type stuff or whatever, but still... in *general*).
The Web is sorta like an "interactive" print media IMHO. We *generally* read static text with the ability to click links and whatnot. But advertisers tend to treat it like Television, with motion ads, flashing ads, sound-enhanced ads, popup ads, etc. etc. It just plain doesn't fit the paradigm.
Maybe instead of annoy people who are reading articles, supplement the articles with paradigm-fitting ads (ie static ads that don't tear attention away from the information content that you're reading). Heck that's how magazines and newspapers work... and work well. Why can't the web?
-Pie
when using linx.
He has a point, though - you are imposing net traffic on a site that needs ad revenue to pay for bandwidth.
...
:)
I propose an alternative:
Have the blocking software register a "hit" for all ads that it blocks.
Maybe they already do this, hehe
That way, Jill Web Artist gets reimbursed for costs (via ad revenue), and the ad companies get shafted.
The potential long term effect of ad companies advertising less, however, could be bad... bah, how likely is THAT to happen?
The barrage will continue until merchants get the message that their advertising companies (who sell YOUR EYEBALLS to the merchant) are costing them customers, and real dollars.
Perhaps we need a "I did NOT buy X because of Ad Y" type site, where folk can log complaints about specific ads, advertisers, and merchants.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
In Opera: F12 -> Disable Javascript
Enable Javascript only when you really need it. takes care of pretty much everything, when combined with junkbusters proxy.
The potential long term effect of ad companies advertising less
No, they'll advertise more. They'll just offer less compensation to those who carry it to offset the "ad shrinkage" (presuming they don't already only advertise based on performance click-through).
This is already happening with AdWords - Adwords were a pretty fine way for small, one man shops to earn a bit of income with some barely intrusive ads. Now with clickbots inevitably either the small guy will be cut out, or the payment per click will be dramatically reduced as a "fraud surcharge".
The new Google Groups has this annoying "go to top" floater that remains at the top of your screen when you scroll. It's not an ad... it just says the name of the group, the name of the thread, and a link to the top of it. I wish I could kill this...
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
Links
The Farewell Tour II
Apparently, your television stations are nicer than mine. I routinely see ads that take up roughly the bottom 1/4 to 1/3 of the screen, covering the entire width. They are animated, occasionally breaking out of their already huge "strip" with a person or logo that stands up. And to make it worse, in the last year or two, they've started having SOUND.
Even the "nicer" stations are now animating their little logos, which are substantially larger than they used to be.
I'm familiar with programs like SpamAssasin. Why not include the spam detector into the blocker. Thus a floatover is part of the site, passed spam detector. The floatover would be needed.
A squad with a few Auto-Cannons can easily take care of a bunch of Floaters, especially if you've got Personal Armour.
[To non-X-com mods, it's an injoke, not offtopic.]
If you actually check this users history, he WORKS!! FOR THE SAME COMPANY!!!
I've never used flashblock, and hadn't heard of it before. The *first match* on a google search for the word "flashblock" took me to their site:
flashblock.mozdev.org
Looks like an easy install, although for some reason you're supposed to restart the browser twice. Hope it works for you!
1) click them lots
2) don't buy anything
3) refresh the page a few (hundred) times
4) ????
5) they dont profit
if the advertisers pay per click, then the click will soon be come as low value as the pay per banner view has become. if everyone moved to a pay per sale, then add would actually have to not annoy potential customers
When I find a site such as these I either click the "X" to close the offending window, or whatever else is available for the same result. If nothing is available (I haven't seen a site where it is not), I'd email someone about it. If that did nothing, I'd just avoid the site.
Too many people are trying to find "new and inventive ways" to solve these annoyances. The old ways are often the best. If you don't like it, don't go there. Done. Next problem...
The Mozilla PrefBar has a Kill Flash button, and also a checkbox that allows you to enable or disable Flash as you see fit.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
if i see your ad on any sort of popup, your product is BLACKLISTED, i will NEVER buy it, and i will tell my FRIENDS not to buy it.
using popup ads is the surest way to get me NOT to buy your product.
pissing us off is NO way to sell product!
p.s. the same thing goes for animated gifs and macromedia flash. yes, you're getting my attention - NEGATIVE attention! now i know what NOT to buy!
if i'm a grammar nazi, you're an illiteracy nazi.
Firefox + Adblock.
c om/*
Yeah, some sites will use random names, but until they start running around and picking up completely random domain names, Adblock will still do the trick.
Install it and block these:
http://*.adtmt.com/*
http://*.mediaplex.
See what happens, and keep blocking anytime you run into an ad.
More annoying than floaters are forced-registration sites. The poster child of forced-registration is nytimes, of course.
:)
Here's a clever approach:
http://www.bugmenot.com/
It's a database of voluntarily-shared registration accounts. The idea is that people don't have to give up their identity, or spend time making up false information and resubmitting until it passes validation, in order to visit these sites!
BTW, my nytimes account is nospam2/nospam2
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
amen
a loogie which has been spit into a pool, drink, bowl, etc. Apropos
Get it and enjoy safer, securer, faster surfing.
There are many ways advertisers can construct irritating advertisements, and the more of them you disable, the more you're taking away from legitimate websites. Some people disable JavaScript entirely, thus making it hard for most websites to rely on it (though GMail does, which helps the rest of us). Some people disable Flash. This is less bad, but there are some websites that use it innocuously, like for their menus. Many people, including myself, disable pop-ups. Fortunately they're usually allowed in response to click events, which is how most of the legitimate ones are used, but some ad pop-ups are now being coded to spawn in response to click events, so people will disable pop-ups entirely soon. Now there are floaters. Of course these are the most irritating form of advertising. What do you do in this situation? Stop going to the websites that employ them! E-mail the administrator and let him know how much you hate those goddamn ads! My website uses a floating pop-up for a legitimate purpose. When you try creating a post, an iframe is quickly and invisibly loaded to check if your password is correct. If it is, the comment is submitted. If it is not, a pop-up spawns telling you that and letting you change your password if you want... but this happens without redirecting the main page, which would be annoying. Anyway since this pop-up loads from the iframe's onLoad handler, pop-up blockers block it, so I used a floating fake pop-up to get around it. You can see my floater by going to a sample post (like http://devimg.net/?Post=194) and posting a comment using someone's name, such as "CGameProgrammer", without a password (or with the wrong one). Incidentally, I also employ one other floater to get around another limitation -- there is no "_opener" target for anchor links. Since I wanted links in a pop-up to open in the main window, but to open in the same window if it's not in a pop-up, the solution I decided worked the best was to use a fake pop-up instead of a real one. This floater is spawned when you click the "referrers" button on the top-right of a post.
~CGameProgrammer( );
It's idiotic that Slashdot's comment system doesn't automatically convert newlines to
tags... I keep forgetting I need to manually place them. Below is how the post was meant to look:
There are many ways advertisers can construct irritating advertisements, and the more of them you disable, the more you're taking away from legitimate websites.
Some people disable JavaScript entirely, thus making it hard for most websites to rely on it (though GMail does, which helps the rest of us).
Some people disable Flash. This is less bad, but there are some websites that use it innocuously, like for their menus.
Many people, including myself, disable pop-ups. Fortunately they're usually allowed in response to click events, which is how most of the legitimate ones are used, but some ad pop-ups are now being coded to spawn in response to click events, so people will disable pop-ups entirely soon.
Now there are floaters. Of course these are the most irritating form of advertising. What do you do in this situation? Stop going to the websites that employ them! E-mail the administrator and let him know how much you hate those goddamn ads!
My website uses a floating pop-up for a legitimate purpose. When you try creating a post, an iframe is quickly and invisibly loaded to check if your password is correct. If it is, the comment is submitted. If it is not, a pop-up spawns telling you that and letting you change your password if you want... but this happens without redirecting the main page, which would be annoying. Anyway since this pop-up loads from the iframe's onLoad handler, pop-up blockers block it, so I used a floating fake pop-up to get around it.
You can see my floater by going to a sample post (like http://devimg.net/?Post=194) and posting a comment using someone's name, such as "CGameProgrammer", without a password (or with the wrong one).
Incidentally, I also employ one other floater to get around another limitation -- there is no "_opener" target for anchor links. Since I wanted links in a pop-up to open in the main window, but to open in the same window if it's not in a pop-up, the solution I decided worked the best was to use a fake pop-up instead of a real one. This floater is spawned when you click the "referrers" button on the top-right of a post.
~CGameProgrammer( );