Slashdot Mirror
Website Mass-Bans Users Who Mention AdBlock
An anonymous reader writes to recommend TechDirt's take on the dustup over at the Escapist, which recently tried on banning users from their forums for the mere mention of AdBlock. In the thread in which the trouble started, a user complained that an ad for Time Warner Cable was slowing down his computer. Users who responded to the poster by suggesting "get Firefox and AdBlock" found themselves banned from the forums. The banned parties didn't even need to admit they used AdBlock, they simply had to recommend it as a solution to a troublesome ad. The forum's recently amended posting guidelines do indeed confirm that the folks at the Escapist believe that giving browsing preference advice is a "non forgivable" offense. After a lot of user protest, the forum unbanned the transgressors but heaped on the guilt.
Given that they have reversed the bans since then, it's not that simple, now is it? What is the value of a site without visitors?
When Microsoft decided that they wanted to limit the number of features in the OS based on how much I was willing to pay them, I changed operating systems.
When the Sea Shepherds decided that terrorism was a valid way of combating whaling, I stopped contributing to them.
When Hamas decided that war with Israel would broaden their support, I decided to throw my support elsewhere.
When Obama decided that the only way out of this depression was massive spending programs, I affiliated myself with a different party.
If a site is not going to treat you with respect and dignity, then take your business elsewhere. A site that measures you in "eyeballs" rather than "contributors" is not something you should be associated with in any way.
Fine, I will. Luckily there are sites like Slashdot which do fine without ads.
Hey, where the hell did my previous reply about Digg go?!!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Starting a thread: Posting is an art; be proud of your work.
This tells you everything you need to know about these forums.
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
Lets ban people for suggesting channel switching for the duration of ad breaks on tv aswell...
On the other hand, Slashdot has a right to grouse about it on their own site if they want! Everyone's got rights all around. ;-)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A site I frequent ran some ads for a while that gave me grief. When it spawned a discussion thread they got rather pissy about it.
but, here's a point...
If your Ads fuck-up the user experience that bad then they can't read your site you dimwits. If they can't read it they will go away and not come back. Would you rather have that? -FIX- the Ads promptly and there won't be a problem.
It's not a threat to say "If you don't fix it, I will leave". It's a fact, and it's not entirely by choice.
All internet users should use some Flash blocker that allows the user to accept specific flash content, period.
FireFox and Chrome have plugins called FlashBlock, Safari's is called ClickToFlash. IE8 provides this functionality from the Flash player add-on in Manage Add-ons under Tools, just select More informations and click Remove all sites. All these will let you reenable either individual Flash applets or whole sites when you browse those pages.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Do what Arstechnica discovered after they tried blocking adblock users from seeing articles; actually *ask* your users to whitelist your site in adblock (or other ad blockers) with a promise that if the adverts on the site cause issues with users machines that they will work to resolve them and/or remove those adverts from rotation.
So far, every site that I use regularly and trust (for appropriate values of trust) that have asked me to whitelist them have had their request granted. I'm happy to help out the sites with their revenue on the condition that the adverts on said site do not impact my browsing experience; pop-ups, pop-unders, sound, fullscreens, "intellitext" or mid-paragraph ads are an instant nono, as are any that impact page loading due to shoddy design and overloaded ad servers, but I'm willing to put up with most other ads if I'm asked to in order to support the site.
I pay for my bandwidth I'll choose what I download, including page elements.
The Internet was so much better before corporations/bussiness was significantly interested. Befor anyone says the ads pay for content there was plenty of content in the early days of the internet, much of it was high quality because the people who placed it there wanted to, were interested or passionate . Not because they were getting paid.
I turned off my TV in 1996, internet entropy has caught up with television. It is becoming prepackaged "safe for idiots" and less free
What's new? At least slashdot was enlightened enough to implement measures to counteract admin/moderator abuse. Right on, slashdot!
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
After the community manager unbanned everyone, the follow-up posts in that thread are all fan-boyish groveling which I totally don't understand. "We shouldn't use adblockers anyway!! Thanks for unbanning! Much respect!!" Respect for what? Taking the boot off your throat? Here's some bannable "browsing preference advice:" don't read The Escapist.
The first rule of ad blocking is you DON'T talk about ad blocking!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
The same place as any person inquiring about AllParadox goes on Groklaw. (He left the site due to their moderation policies which are both sneakily implemented and poorly known. See his post to the SCOX forums, for example.)
Not too long ago, around a year ago, Blizzard added banner ads to the official World of Warcarft game forums.
People strongly objected on the basis that nobody can post to those forums unless they already pay Blizzard money for an account, so why should paying customers be subjected to the advertisements? They clearly didn't need advertising revenue to pay the bills, it was just a crass money-grab. This spawned many posts on how to block the ads. The result? All of the ad-blocking discussion threads deleted, and all of their creators banned from the forums. Some people complained, but they soon found out that talking about deleted threads is also grounds for a ban.
It sucks, but what can you do? The only way they would have any incentive to change is if people actually quit the game in protest over the decision, which isn't particularly likely. They perhaps spent some of their good will by way of their actions, but there's no real immediate or obvious negative repercussions.
I am torn as well. I understand the need for advertisements to subsidize content on the web, but I also see it as an issue when a company abuses the ubiquity of ads to slip them in as a money-grab when they clearly aren't dependent on advertising for their revenue. Moreover, I really feel like it should be obvious at this point that banner ads are stupid. They fact that people go to such lengths to remove them should indicate how people feel about them. They're really no different then spam; except spam is free, so it can be profitable with abysmal response rates. Does anyone actually buy anything as result of banner ads? Sure people click them all the time, but how often is it done on purpose? The damn things are just in the way. I'm constantly accidentally tapping on ads on my iPhone, but I sure as hell have never bought anything as a result.
Annoying flash ads, banner ads, and javascript-fueled nightmare ads are not selling anything. Anyone notice those are all things Google does not use? I think they know a thing or two about the business of internet ads. They've got 25 billion dollars in the bank that says internet advertising works better when its not obtrusive and obnoxious.
What is the value of a site without visitors?
The site owners banned these people because they don't see any value in a site without revenue.
only because social media will make it an issue and make the situation worse than it is for them.
Strange that Escapist is being singled out when the same policy can be found in several other forums. http://diablo.incgamers.com/forums/faq.php?faq=rules is one: You use DIII.Net and its affiliates in the full knowledge that advertising in the form of banner adverts, interstitials and embedded adverts appear on all pages. You agree to not interfere with the display of these adverts through banner blocking software or browser features.
But whatever, I've since learnt to keep it to myself that I'm blocking ads. Sad that there are lots of people out there annoyed by ads and do not know that ads can be easily blocked, but I'm not going to teach them on a public forum that is ad supported. I also keep out of threads where people bitch about the ads on the forum.
I pay for my pipe. I own my computers, and have root/admin rights and responsibilities for them. It is my duty to myself and others on the Internet to lock down security threats I know about. As an IT person, if I do not take steps to stop an avenue of infection, then I'm committing gross negligence at my job.
Some ad-rotators from third parties are one of the top sources of browser exploits. A lot of unscrupulous ad services place control of the ad to anyone who comes with dollars. This means they can go for a browser add-on exploit, or many other things. And since the ad is random, neither the ad company, nor the malware company making ads gets blamed. Everyone wins except for the website, and the user.
Even first tier ad companies have gotten bitten by this in the past: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/13/doubleclick_distributes_malware/
So until I can get some assurance from ad companies that they are not allowing people to serve up malware, I will take steps to protect security, and that means Adblock, NoScript, and on company networks, I'm going to be using Privoxy or some commercial ad-busting transparent proxy to make sure that this avenue of intrusion is closed.
And if some website bans people for wanting to protect their own security, fuck them. It is as simple as that. Most users if banned will just create another user from a different IP. If the new user creation process gets too stiff, that web forum will just fade into irrelevance, unless it caters to just a small, inbred crowd.
Apparently (FTA), this is in the site's T&Cs
Do not confess, teach, admit to, or promote ad-blocking software that will allow users to block the ads of this site.
Great. Using ad/flash-blocking software is a crime now? Whatever happened to reasonable discussion?
Instead of just banning the users, could the mods not have simply pointed out that the site needed the ad revenue to survive, and also acted to remove the offensive ads?
Who are the customers of a site such as this; the users, or the advertisers?
That, or The Escapist could've simply looked into the matter, discover the banner causing problems and remove it from their rotation (or contact the banner vendor they get it from) and everybody would say "the Escapist are awesome for actually listening to their visitors".
Quite a contrast there, eh?
There is a good reason a home is called a home. As opposed to a marketplace. People like to actually live at home, not at the marketplace (shopaholics excluded.)
Internet used to be more of a home. Now it is become more of a marketplace. Everywhere you turn, there is some shmuck pitching and pushing his stuff onto you, and when you refuse he goes verbal.
The whole thing is rooted in overpopulation again. Too many people need to survive, and they colonize the Internet space, with their smallminded schemes.
He's back!
If the site owners need to make sure that everyone that reads the site also gets the ads, then they simply have to figure something else out. Make ad downloading mandatory in order to download the content, or mix ads and content in some more elaborate way. As long as I need to do a number of separate downloads for the ads (http requests for images for example), or even RUN ads as applications (for example flash), I choose when and if I download those ads. This is simply a problem with html and http, nothing else. Should be a disappearing problem as more and more sites realize they need to move off html in order to make sure that what people see is what they intend (for good and bad, ads being the bad).
I do agree that anyone can ban anyone off a private forum, at random, or for any reason however stupid.
Indeed. So it's bye bye, Escapist: you were kinda cool once, but I don't support assholes.
Circumcision is child abuse.
When Obama decided that the only way out of this depression was massive spending programs, I affiliated myself with a different party.
I hope it wasn't the Republicans, since the bailout that was required to prevent a depression directly resulting from years of irresponsible lack of oversight was initiated by George W. Bush and merely completed by Obama.
I also hope it wasn't the Libertarians, since it was their lassaiz-faire philosophy of deregulation and strict adherence to the Chicago School of Economics which infected and drove the Republican deregulation push of the last 20 years that in turn was directly responsible for the unregulated behavior that resulted in the current crash, and would have sent us directly into a second Great Depression had Bush/Obama/Brown not acted as they did.
I'm not sure what that leaves ... the Greens? Aryan Nationalists? Socialists? Teabaggers? Communists? The Party of Everything-is-Black-and-White-No-Exceptions-Allowed-and-Anything-That-Doesn't-Fit-My-World-View-Perfectly-Must-Be-a Liberal/Conservative-Conspiracy?
One issue only voting rarely works out--there will be some other issue in your new affiliation that drives you away, like a lone sheep being herded back and forth across the paddock by a playful terrier.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
"As we've mentioned previously in great detail, if you've got ads on your website that are annoying your users, that is your fault -- not your users' fault. "
he writes this with a massive animated HP advert that takes up 1/4 of the column width down the side
SURELY NOT!!!!!
when you can use flashblock, stopping JavaScript animations and NoScript. It means if I can't see an advert, it's the own website's own fault. My Netbook is slow enough on the web without Flash and fancy Javascript. Interesting affects of my usage are that www.newgrounds.com accuses me of adblocking in their advert spots and screwattack.com videos don't play unless I turn off NoScript.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
There is a difference; the cost on entry is pretty low for a website while astronomical for a TV station(not including public access). Don't visit the horrific sites that bother you with ads. Find a nice little corner of the internet and hang out where people are willing to pay their money for your entertainment and mooch off of them until they can't afford to do it anymore, then find someone else who is willing to pay for your entertainment, and repeat.
Just don't complain that other people are trying to make a living by providing a service supported by ads. If you don't like it, fine. Just go somewhere else.
An important change for education.
August 2009 - April 2010..
That's eight freaking months!
Every time HardOCP or TechReport mention web browsers, ADBlock Plus is sure to follow in the discussion. When that happens, administrators go ban crazy on their asses. If your tech website relies on revenue from ads to the point when you ban forum posters, you're just digging a slow grave for your site. The website ads are nothing more then another form of pop-up ads.
once the html is in my browser it will be parsed how I see fit on MY machine.
Here's a thought, just to play devil's advocate. Is it legal to modify the content being transmitted to my own machine? I don't have copyright over it, so do I only have permission to transfer it for viewing? The browser has to render it of course, so there's wiggle room there, but what about Privoxy?
In the same vein, does the ISP have the right to modify, for example replacing ads with their own? In fact, I wonder if any ISP's are surreptitiously doing just that right now. Not necessarily different ads, just redirecting the cash flow. Who would notice!
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Fine, they're certainly within their rights, but on the other hand, it comes across as extremely petty and childish.
If they want to behave like 7 year old children, that's their perogative. But then they have to accept the consequences of the negative feelings they generate.
They can be as right as they want, but that'll do absolutely no good if they handle the situation poorly and antagonise their users. Being right isn't a license to behave like a tool.
not my bandwidth bills they don't. I can choose to revoke access to my bandwidth and PC however i choose, and if that means certain ads then tough shit.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I might be quite backward in my thinking here but... I pay my isp for a subscription to access the internets (every last one of them). The specific contect I choose to receive or block at my end is my own damn business. It's like being banned from walking down the street because I chose not to look at the billboards!
On the other hand, Slashdot has a right to grouse about it on their own site if they want! Everyone's got rights all around. ;-)
I second that, everyone do what they want so long as it doesn't come to threats destruction fists and bullets. In fact I would make that the one-line constitution and we'd be better off.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
AutoPager also prevents ads from displaying, so it may become the next unmentionable. Eventually any system which messes with the HTML or scripts.
slashdot have allowed me to turn off adverts, but I haven't. I have adblock installed, but I am not subscribed to any block lists, I generally only block adverts and advertisers which are particularly instrusive (for example, trustedreviews' website has broken adverts which obscure text, and theregister have adverts in the middle of the articles). I occasionally find adverts useful so I would miss them, but I am merely very selective, and I would rather put up with a bit of screen clutter to buy content instead of paying cold hard cash!!
It's juvenile behaviour of people who who have not grown up enough (mentally) to be something on their own but get their self esteem by belonging to a group.
To give some examples more relevant to slashdot where I've seen/experienced this: gnu.misc.discuss springs to mind where everything Stallman says or does is perfect and noone should ever criticize him or suggest alternatives. It's quite similar to religious zealotry and Linux enthusiasts often are no better than that (dare to criticize the GPL or suggest alternatives and see what happens). BSD people are often tired of this and it's one of the reasons I switched to FreeBSD (the final straw was Torvalds behaviour, esp. the unfounded (read as: based on made up 'facts') criticism of John Dyson (the FreeBSD VM guy)). I tried OpenBSD but there's a similar situation with Theo de Raadt. He has done some good things but he's also an ass. The group-following-a-leader phenomenon is clearly visible there too and I wanted none of that.
Yep the best sites are often those with no ads. Yes paying the bills is a problem for everyone too, but if it's solved in ways which involve less money and forcing things etc it's much better. Plus often paying the bills is no longer the problem at all, just increasing profits.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
What if you know for sure you will never buy or use any of the products advertised - is it still bad? I live in a different country and most of these ads advertise services not applicable to me or my profession, the online shops don't ship to my address and so on. When you block the ad you're also saving site bandwidth and also reducing impressions and the amount of money the advertiser has to pay for displaying ads to non target audience visitors.
"I believe one of two things. Either we have unlimited rights, or we have no rights at all. Personally, I lean more towards the side of unlimited rights, which means I have the right to do anything I please. But if I do something you don't like, I believe you have the right to kill me. So where you going to find a fairer fucking deal than that, huh?"
(George Carlin. RIP)
Ban all the ads. Problem is with time the ads become the priority, and the content is there just to keep people at the site, it doesn't really matter to the publisher what the content is so long as people see the ads. Therefore, stupid tv programs, spam, domain squatters, pages with stolen, duplicate, software-generated content, pointless content of all types becomes the rule. Advertisers should band up and create a common index of all services organized with some coherence, so people just search and find when they need something.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Yes, mod points seem to be a lot rarer after ticking the disable ads box. If this is indeed a real policy, it should be made public so we can assess the pros and cons of ad-free viewing.
I find it amusing that in the thread where they recant the bans... the community manager goes on to explain that forum guidelines have been edited to explain that admitting to using or promoting one (adblockers) will result in a warning and then a perma-ban.
After which he goes on to admit and explain how he uses an adblocker.
That's fine, so long as you also realise the site owner can make whatever arbitrary rulings he wants about what people do on his forums - no matter how dumb they are, no matter if we can all predict the mass exodus of users.
When you don't have ads? I guess Slashdot's slashvertisment is the best way, it's certainly the least unobtrusive way of advertising.
If I had created the world I wouldn't have messed about with butterflies and daffodils. I would have started with lasers
AdBlock is of course not ideal from a website's owners point of view.
A proper admin would have solved the problem, not made a new one.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
You joke, but I'd be surprised if TV stations didn't have strict rules about programmes not telling viewers to channel surf while the adverts are on.
I thought you need to enable Javascript to get them in the first place.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
Zero Punctuation did a piece on this recently. Here's transcript:
Ananonymousreaderwritestorecommend TechDirt'stakeonthedustupoverattheEscapist, whichrecentlytriedonbanningusersfromtheirforums forthemerementionofAdBlock. Inthethreadinwhichthetroublestarted, ausercomplainedthat anadforTimeWarnerCablewasslowingdownhiscomputer. Userswhorespondedtothe posterbysuggesting"getFirefoxandAdBlock"foundthemselvesbannedfromtheforums. Thebannedparties didn'tevenneedtoadmittheyusedAdBlock,theysimplyhadtorecommenditasasolutiontoatroublesomead. Theforum'srecentlyamended postingguidelinesdoindeed confirmthatthefolksat theEscapistbelievethatgiving browsingpreferenceadviceisa"nonforgivable"offense. Afteralotofuserprotest, theforumunbannedthe transgressorsbutheapedontheguilt. AND THEN THEY ALL HAD LEMON MERANGE PIES.
@"The Internet was so much better before corporations/business was significantly interested."
Plus now they are interested, they show through their own actions, they have no moral limit to how far they will go. This action by them is blatantly effectively punishing Thought Crimes. I guess talking about AdBlock is against what the business wants, which is effectively compliant consumers who don't learn how to block advert bombardment.
I guess they have never heard of the Barbra Streisand effect.
But it does makes me wonder what kind of world we are heading into where corporations gain ever greater control of the major web sites when they show they are so willing to behave like this.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
I am going to block ads, full stop. That's it.
If all your shitty web site has as a means of revenue generation is ads, consider revenue to be zero. It is or it will be. Don't complain that your users are blocking ads, get another revenue model.
If you don't have anything worth selling, something that I want to buy, then your web site can go and die (or you can maintain it at a loss). If that sounds harsh, tough titties! I am not here to be an eyeball for your web site. Either take it down and shut up, or find a way to make a profit without being a whiner.
I want my Cowboyneal
I run a site for owners of a certain model of RV (of which only about 1000 were made, so the market for my site really isn't that large). Fortunately for me and my users, I can afford to run it out of my own pocket, without any ads. In fact, other than the domain name, it didn't cost me any additional money over what I was already paying for web hosting anyway. But, it's slowly growing to the point where it will cost me extra. I can absorb some of that, but at some point I'm going to have to ask for donations or put some ads on it... I'm certain most of my users will understand, but I've seen other sites where the users just don't get it - "This has been free in the past so it should continue to be free!" And that's on sites where people spend thousands of dollars modifying their cars, but are insulted when the site owner asks for $12/yearly toward maintaining the site where they got the info on how to modify their cars...
It only takes one bad ad to trigger the use of adblocking technology and then the users won't stop use it.
This is yet another case of ad companies creating problems for users that decreases the usability of a site.
On the other hand - I couldn't see much value over at the Escapist site anyway, at least nothing that did attract me.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Till now I have never heard of this site and have to thank Slashdot because I will never visit it again.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
After many years[1] there finally seems to be some signs of progress being made on features that will help websites make things safer for their users:
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/01/HTML-5-Sandbox-IFrame
http://people.mozilla.org/~bsterne/content-security-policy/
[1] I actually tried to get people to do something about a similar problem 8 years ago:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-html/2002May/0021.html
http://www.mail-archive.com/mozilla-security@mozilla.org/msg01448.html
For years the browser and W3 have been focusing on adding "gas pedals", and their idea of brakes was "just make sure none of the hundreds of gas pedals we created are pressed", which is a bit trickier in the real world.
If they had added working "brake pedals" back then, stuff like the MySpace worm might not have happened. And ads and other 3rd party content might be more easily secured.
even just blocking certain content from rendering does not alter the HTML document.. It merely alters the visual representation of that document. If you already want to classify that as altering a copyright protected document, even rendering a website in a different browser could be illegal.
Anyway, it doesnt matter, i download a certain HTML element, how i chose to render that is completely up to me, by putting adds in pages the author basically makes my computer do something (download from other sources), and they have no intrinsic right to force my computer to do stuff.
Add-blocking might not be very nice, but if adds become annoying enough, i will block them anyway
As for the escapist, i enjoy ZeroPunctuation, but this kind of shit makes me feel like giving their site a permanent miss.. If you behave like a dick towards your visitors, expect them to find some place else to hang out
People, what a bunch of bastards
You are absolutely right in stating this right. I just want to ad that none of the rights are earned without pay, without sacrifice.
We should all be aware that we have to sacrifice for our right to choose what we see, read or listen to on our personal equipment and this sacrifice is that we do not attend the websites that practice violation of this right.
Without proposals of such actions, it's just a little more than whining.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The problem I see with ads is editorial control.
With real magazines ads, editors have some kind of control of the ad after they receive it. For example, they can decide if they accept an ad with a full page giant penis in it selling v14gr4.
However, with web ads, the editors have no control over it. The advertizer has complete control of how the ad looks. And even though at the time of "contracting" the ad the editors may like the types of ad, maybe after a month the ad will get changed to something really annoying.
3rd-party ad servers do have one benefit: There is no direct relationship between content makers and product makers. With magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and direct online ad sales, there is a temptation to do secret editorial-for-content deals with their product-maker customers.
Advertising is most suitable for things like classifieds and job ads. But interruptions with agendas are a pretty silly way to learn about new products. It would be better if we paid people to help us select products.
It's their site, they pay for hosting.
But they don't pay for their visitors' CPU power or bandwidth. The site is well within their rights to show ads, but visitors are well within their rights to block them from their screens.
As I understand from the discussion, you can also pay The Escapist and never see an ad again, which sounds like a pretty good deal for a site with that much original content. Even when a site is free, it may be worth supporting it with your money.
From many of the posts on the thread in question ...
Mod Edit: Blocking ads is being rude to everyone that works for this site. Non-forgivable offense. -Kuliani
What this Kuliani guy needs to learn is that ABUSIVE ads ... and I already saw several on his site (I'm not blocking them) are rude ... and insulting ... to his readers. I fully understand wanting to show ads on the site to support it. But abusive ads are not called for. Friendly, non-abusive, ads keep your community happy while keeping the site alive.
It sounds to me like Time-Warner needs to be banned for 7 days for first offense.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Darl? Is that you?
Here's a thought, just to play devil's advocate. Is it legal to modify the content being transmitted to my own machine? I don't have copyright over it, so do I only have permission to transfer it for viewing? The browser has to render it of course,
If you only change how the browser renders it, then you're not modifying the content itself (the html, or the embedded images), but only the presentation of that content, which the entire purpose of the browser. You can't dictate exactly how a website will look on a visitor's machine, because his browser does that.
the Zero Punctuation videos are hilarious
meep
There was a slashdot ad a while back for Chrome on the Mac, that I only saw on my Mac. That makes sense... except that I have Chrome installed and Opera is just my preffered browser because it is the best (Tabbed browsing baked in, mouse gestures that are integrated and keeping all tabs open between reboots, always without fail (take that firefox)).
But I also installed privoxy the moment I got one of those "you have won" banners that have gotten even more annoying since the last time I browsed without an adblocker.
It is far easier for me to block all ads with a single install, then to unblock an ad.
Same as it is MUCH easier for me to listen to my own MP3's then listen to the radio and its constant ad blocks and self-promotion. What is that about anyway? Listen to US, person who is already listening to us. Overselling much?
And it is also easier for me to simply download a tv-show rather then deal with the constant ad blocks and ever more annoying ads displayed over the actual program itself.
Advertisers have never learned restraint. If it was up to them a tv program would basically just be an ad interrupted by ads overlayed with ads. And you would pay for each ad.
The shock of going from an adblocked PC to a regular one after a year is huge. It is just getting worse and worse.
So, I block everything. End of story. Let the fools pay for the hosting, I am no fool.
And if that means some mega sites die. Well that is progress for you. Maybe the net just can't be run on ads going out of control. Maybe site masters need to organize and agree a standard for ads. Google only for instance. The only ads I don't block because I can't be arsed since they never annoyed me.
Oh and PRIVOXY, blocks EVERYTHING. That is PRIV[CARRIER LOST]
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This is my computer, and I am going to run whatever software I want on it including adblock & noscript. websites have abused their users with popups, popunders, animated gifs so dazzling that would make some people have seizures, so fuck the entire internet (nothing personal) just that they lost the privilege of being able to put just anything in my browser.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Moreover, I really feel like it should be obvious at this point that banner ads are stupid. They fact that people go to such lengths to remove them should indicate how people feel about them. They're really no different then spam; except spam is free, so it can be profitable with abysmal response rates. Does anyone actually buy anything as result of banner ads? Sure people click them all the time, but how often is it done on purpose? The damn things are just in the way. I'm constantly accidentally tapping on ads on my iPhone, but I sure as hell have never bought anything as a result.
Yes, advertising is a pretty silly way to find out about new things, or to research a way to fill a need. The best form of advertising is search-driven ads, which is why Google is so profitable. But still, such ads come with strong agendas, unlike organic results from independent parties.
We should be finding improved ways of funding such independent help. Paywalls reduce use and visibility, while affiliate links turn content providers into salesmen. But affiliates can earn people's trust. Do you trust Slashdot not to skew book reviews to the positive, because it means extra Amazon income?
This is the same website that bans you if they think you've commented too quickly on a video. If they didn't have ZP, I'd never go there.
Plus now they are interested, they show through their own actions, they have no moral limit to how far they will go. This action by them is blatantly effectively punishing Thought Crimes. I guess talking about AdBlock is against what the business wants, which is effectively compliant consumers who don't learn how to block advert bombardment.
Talk of Adblock is a signal that the user is empowering themselves. If you want to make money with computers, the last thing you want is the user to become empowered, you need them reliant on you, the man in the middle providing a service.
Long term successful products on computers do not empower users, they make users dependent. Now, for an example, this'll go 2 ways: Windows (insightful please), MacOS (flamebait from the fanboys). But the point is valid. You don't learn about computers using those platforms, you learn about those platforms. We've all seen Windows users who brain shuts down in front of OSX, or Mac users who bitch about any other platform - it is because they are familiar with their platform, but not the ideas behind what they are doing.
Facecrook, Google et al. use the same idea: be the middle man, make the user come to you as the first thing when they need to contact someone, or want some information, etc..
Car analogies break down.
I've started using ad blocker, and I haven't turned back. I always thought that firefox bloat was the reason for website rendering to slow down. But after installing ad block and no script, I realized it's the content that's getting bloated.
it would be rather trivial to check any incomming request for a certain cookie or whatever, and if it isnt present, redirect said user to the EULA page
or just put all content behind a login, even a free login will force everyone viewing the content to accept the EULA.
People, what a bunch of bastards
I've started using multiple browser Safari with ClickToFlash handles nice sites fairly well, but any less well behaved site gets opened in FireFox with FlashBlock, AdBlock, and NoScript.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Nonsense, there is still punctuation -- and capital letters! -- in that. What you want is http://antipunctuation.com/ for no spaces, no lower-case, truly zero punctuation.
No, their advertisers pay for hosting.
And their visitors pay their advertisers, so I guess that means their visitors pay their hosting.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Original Complaint was about a particular ad slowing down the whole site.
No, the original complaint was about a particular ad slowing down the user's browser, including any other sites they might have had open. In fact, at least one user found it crashed their browser repeatedly, which is a non-forgivable offense in the modern era of tabbed browsing.
I am a strong supporter of adblocking software on Firefox or anything else. I do not consent to the level of advertising that seems to be acceptable to most people. I believe that spending 10% of your life being assaulted by advertising is not a good way to live. Further I believe that some advertising is directly causing harm to people by constantly playing on their fears and promoting irrational greed. The balance is wrong and we should have the means to tip it back to a sane level.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
I haven't found a huge pushback against relatively unobtrusive ads that are reasonably tasteful, especially if the site owner explains why they were introduced, and the site has a community that actually knows and believes the site owner. A lot of the backlash is over the total opposite extreme of no ads: ads plastered on the page in 10-15 locations and even breaking the flow of articles, some animated in Flash (which also grabs your mouse pointer and breaks kb navigation), some of which play sounds at you, and some displaying gross teeth and spiders and fat bellies and god knows what else.
If you have a community that cares about the site, you might try gently introducing some optional payment options also. Even trivial things like: support the site with a $10 donation and you get a little icon next to your name in the forums as recognition.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I had the same thing happen to me on cnn.com. I posted a comment in reply to an article on ACTA. Basically I just recited some information I had heard on NPR earlier in the day. No profanity, flaming, trolling or anything of the sort.
The next day when I attempted to post I get a message "you have been banned from posting in forums". I finally found an e-mail address that was supposed to provide help with forums issue, but received no reply. My account was never locked out, as I can still log in, but still no posting in forums.
My opinion is that we're seeing a trend of websites banning people from forums to suit their own needs. Which is disturbing because what? We are supposed to only make comments that agree with the web site staff? That doesn't seem right.
I supose it's possible this was some type of technical error, and IT does not read the "help" inbox. Not that CNN actually cares, but I have dropped their feed, and now read Reuters for world news.
"Hitler discovers that his Hitler parody video has been taken down."
The only reason I ever visit The Escapist is Zero Punctuation. Got a direct link to it, and ignore everything else...
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Ah, because public outcry made them unban people and still tighten their rules it's not an issue? Neither in this specific case nor generally?
Today I used a computer without adblock for the first time in months
I stopped at stared at the ads without realising they were ads.
They were so alien to me I couldn't comprehend why there was a picture of a fat woman on the screen which was ttoally irrelevant to what I was reading
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
The link to that story about AllParadox is here for anyone who is smart enough to require them for a bold claim like that.
You can find other, independent corroboration of that from some poor sod who commented about it years ago, from someone who was briefly given moderation powers on Groklaw, and more recent examples on Jay Maynard's website which has some active discussions about how it's going down right now, with respect to those who don't think IBM was justified in how it intimidated TurboHercules SAS.
I've seen it personally, but you don't have to take my word for it. Their idea of "trolls" over there is anyone who disagrees too often. I think that anyone has been around Groklaw for long enough should remember how respected AllParadox was. She calls people who bring up this stuff "PJ moderates trolls" just so you know. Because nobody can think that sneaky moderation systems that don't show you when your post has been deleted, or silently editing people's comments are bad without being paid to think that by SCO, Microsoft or Satan.
...right, and so then the Mods decided:
The beatings will continue until Morale improves...
Good call... Not. {roll_eyes}
"...there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight. Awkwardness and stupidity can." ~ Mark Twain
I wonder how many times the Barbra Streisand effect actually has a somewhat positive effect. Lets face it unless you're looking for game reviews you probably wouldn't have known about Escapist to begin with. However now with it on the front page of the news I am willing to bet quite a few people will head on over to check out the site. From the negative point of view a forum I never knew existed (and I go to the website weekly for a specific video review) banning a few users because admins decided they were talking about things that potentially cut off their main revenue stream doesn't register at all to me. I'll still go there, and probably still won't visit the forum I knew nothing about. But I'm sure someone will "discover" this site due to the Streisand effect.
Agree strongly. After enjoying ZP I started looking around at some of the other batches of videos and most of them are entirely pathetic in comparison. If the first video I saw on the site was not ZP I probably would have never come back.
Fear is the mind killer.
Regardless of what a user does with it after downloading, AdBlock is indeed a good solution for blocking an ad that is giving you trouble with your computer (or that you find offensive, or whatever). It's an absolutely effective tool for the problem that was originally brought up. A car can be used for drive-by shootings and police chases, but that doesn't mean you have to use it for that.
What is the value of a site without visitors?
The site owners banned these people because they don't see any value in a site without revenue.
And they un-banned them because they realized, belatedly, that without visitors there will be zero revenue. Why is that so hard to grasp? When users feel compelled to take extra steps (AdBlock), just to wade through the crap to get to what they value (content) you're doing it wrong.
No. If you put up a website accessible from the public Internet, then you should expect that the public is going to access it using the software of their choice, period. If you don't like it, don't publish on the web.
http://outcampaign.org/
What would be awesome is if Adblock worked in kind, and just "adblock" escapists domain. lol
I'm quite the oddball, I guess, but, I haven't browsed with scripts enabled by default since the mid-90s.
Although huge chunks of the modern internet simply don't work without it, I simply move along and ignore such sites - even if I've been browsing them for a long time. If I'm not welcome, I'll go find somewhere that I am; it's a very big internet. Exceptions usually require me moving to another browser on another computer and making onerous configuration changes that are good for only one session; this is deliberate so that I make the exceptions only when they're important (same for images and flash; the actual process is booting a flash drive with Ubuntu and viewing the page, then shutting down).
But one side-effect of that is that I never see ads. I don't have flash installed anyway, but even aside from that, I still almost never see ads. JPEG- and GIF-only banners went out of style a very long time ago; plus, I don't have images turned on by default either (half the time, I'm using lynx or some kind of configuration in a program like emacs that takes so long to configure that I simply don't bother).
I will say, though, that when Google first started selling ads (I mean banner ads, not homepage search ads), I was very surprised because - for the first time in several years - I could see them! You see, these ads had fallback text, and didn't require scripts, and in the beginning had no flash at all. I absolutely did not mind these at all; they used minuscule bandwidth, essentially zero processing time, couldn't possibly harm my computer or spam me with pop-ups or achieve anything but the most rudimentary tracking without me clicking on them, and were marked - in readable text - as advertising.
But after a year or two, the Google ads began disappearing until there were none at all. I guess that gradually started using scripts and flash - I doubt Google has stopped selling ads. I remember that they said that they would permit flash soon in the future if it totaled less than 50k and didn't use sound.
What I want to know is: sure, I can think of a thousand reasons why you want scripts, flash and frames (I am actually a web developer); but why don't you have fallback text? Tracking efforts and such are useful, and creativity is your cleverest tool in advertising, but it looks like you have backed yourself into and all-or-nothing corner where you can't go back to text, and you can't suppress a revolt from your most lucrative market who are fed up with the outrageous processing and bandwidth requirements you are demanding, even as computers become more portable (meaning less bandwidth) and greener (meaning lower power consumption hence less processing power).
It's almost as if there is literally an untapped market there. I can only presume that Google found out first-hand that there was no such market; or, more likely, that advertisers of the day refused to pay to reach them no matter how many there were. We'll see if they end up changing their minds before their host websites lose all of their readers.
Yes it seems the did reverse the bans. However they added to the TOS something along the lines of; "Thou shalt not speak of ad-blocking software on this site". Its a good thing the site mods got religion. Now they can start Holy Crusades for other types of banned speech. That should fit in well with their policy of; give us some money and we will reduce the number of ads you see. How nice, think I'll stick with Adblock.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
It has bothered me for some time that sites are becoming more and more willing to add third party content to the site I navigate to. In theory I do not have a problem with it but in practice it just means that they are skirting their editorial duties and pushing un-reviewed content at users. As others above have mentioned many of these third party ad networks have served up some great malware in the recent past and I am sure will continue to do so. When I go to a site I am indicating that I trust the content served by that site, if they want me to load content from another site I see no reason I am not within my rights to say no. I would be happy to see sites reviewing the ads they want their users to view and serving them from their own domains (they could give a sub domain to their ad provider but it might backfire). But as it stands sites make it difficult for me to pick the good from the bad since I am not going to research all the different ad networks.
There is one line in the post that intrigued me:
I ad-block sites that I've never been to before. If they look like a cool site or something that I'd use in the future, I turn off the ad-blocker on that site for any future visits. It's my way of saying "hmm, good job" to the site.
I realized then that most websites offer opt-out advertising. That is, you have to see it unless you pay, use an ad-blocking program, or contribute something that the owners deem worthy of removing adds (like that tempting "no ads for good karma" thing I keep seeing on /.).
I agree with what this community manager said and I would dare ask the logical follow-up question: why don't websites ask you to opt-in to their advertising? The idea would be simple - you visit the site and after X page views, or some other evil metric, you are taken to a page that says: hey, you can help us out with $$$, view ads, or just be a leech. I firmly believe that you will find that the majority of people who become engaged with the content will select either the $$$ or advertising paths. Right then and there your advertising space is worth more than all of the traditional "opt-out" websites.
So, do any advertising market providers allow for this?
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
Some of the worst of this lot I've seen on The Pirate Bay, so maybe I should try AdBlock for that site. Normally I don't mind ads that behave themselves and don't try to "get in your face". But Flash ads have gone too far afield in this regard.
Let's face it. If you have something to advertise that I am interested in buying, a simple JPeg ad will get my attention. If I am not interested, the most flashy of Flash ads will have no hope in hell of changing my mind, and become annoying if they start tying up my computer resources trying to get my attention for their crappy products.
The owners of Escapist and other sites should recognize this basic fact and spend more time policing the ads and less time harassing their users, who can go elsewhere in a heartbeat. I thought this was obvious, but some never learn.
And when your browser chews up 400 megabytes or worse due to these bloaty ads, that's a problem. Users shouldn't have to throw out their old computers and buy the latest and the greatest just so they aren't slowed to a crawl -- or even crash -- because of silly bloaty ads. Go figure. So the STFU works both ways.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I use Adblock and Flashblock on Firefox. I don't get spyware on my PC. Adblock Plus is probably the single best malware prevention tool there is.
Until the advertising engines (Google included) starts taking responsibility for screening what is going into their ad networks to make sure there is no malware, the responsible system admin SHOULD be blocking their ad servers from their networks.
Corporatism != Free Market
But Fringe can tell you exactly how long before the show comes back on. That's very helpful for people who won't be watching the ads.
So the most secure thing in this regard is to block all ads, and also check for sites that have been blacklisted. Firefox is good in that regard. Can't speak about the other browsers.
And I should be easy on "stupid users" -- we are talking basic human nature and natural curiosity, coupled with ignorance of the technical ramifications of making some of those clicks. And anyone can fall prey to the "stupid user" syndrome, especially if you have just woken up and not had your coffee yet!!!!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I don't click on ads. I rarely, if ever, pay them any attention. When I do, it's for something that would interest me regardless and I probably already knew about. I don't block ads - it's not as reliable as I would want it to be and I don't like pages which load up with missing blocks - I hate my screen looking like they've been loaded on a copy of IE where 50% of DNS queries fail... it's just horrible. I can easily look *around* the ads when they load. I build web-filters for schools as part of my job and I actually go out of my way to configure the open-source filtering software I use to only block what's necessary, not to block sites just because they are used to load ads (a lot of filters come with the ad-domains blacklisted by default).
That said, if your ads are obnoxious I won't bother to block them, even though I could do it in a second, I just won't go to your website very often. If it becomes a real problem, I will complain (if I actually care about the site, like I did with the BBC's TV listings site when it filled up with noisy Crazy Frog ads, and they were promptly removed) or just stop visiting. The beauty of the Internet is that someone, somewhere will have the same content at the same time as you do... there's no such thing as an "exclusive" any more, even if that means someone just copy/pasted an article onto Digg or something. If you have a problem with the way I browse your website - fine, I won't browse it. It's really not that big a deal. I'm not going to be crying myself to sleep because of it.
However, forum moderation is one of my biggest bug-bears. I hate overzealous moderation. And if you moderate comments about your moderation, you're just starting down a slippery slope that will destroy any forum community. I have never been banned, but I have posted comments about bad moderation that I've seen. I've never been banned because, basically, I would never hang out on a forum that I suspected the mods would ever do that sort of thing for just *discussing* a quite reasonable, legal activity. It's just not the way to promote discussion, and if you don't want to promote discussion, don't have a forum.
Forums where every single comment is moderated tend to be dull, enclosed and "up themselves" (i.e. self-promoting). I don't read them, I have little interest in contributing to them. I think the exception would be things like The Register, where I've never had a comment disallowed even when I've been discussing things I would imagine some forums ban you for. Forums which contain an "off-topic" or "general discussion" forum? Sorry, but that's a free reign for anyone. I can understand not breaking the law or discussing breaking the law but virtually everything else is fair game.
Removing fair criticism of yourself is the one thing guaranteed to stop me coming back to your website, though. It means you're a charlatan and a liar - you're trying to paint the picture that your forum is perfect and everyone is happy and that's just disgusting. Some support forums do this, and I just stop buying their products.
If you wonder why you're losing ad-revenue, it's not because of those people who don't want to see ads ever at all (who are in the minority... I don't know the official stats but if it's more than 5% I'd be surprised), it's those people who just won't touch your site/forum ever.
I think the Internet has made my commercial habits even more honed - I stick with a product/website until it pissed me off, and when it does I just find another and stick with that, etc. I take much less crap in terms of things that hinder me getting at the information I need than I do in other media. A TV listings site that I used for *years* and never even bothered to research any other changed its look overnight and destroyed its usability. After the third week or so of trying to cope with it, I just researched others, moved on and have *never* been back to that site since. On the Internet, the user is king. Even a bad redesign or dodgy scripts or slow access ca
I used adblock on /. right up until they gave me that option. I don't use it, but just having them offer it conspicuously on the front page is enough to make me want to support them. :)
I also find that the bar-stewards collaborate on their commercial breaks, meaning that switching to a different channel often gets you the same inane ads about fuel efficiency, automobile collision legal advice and the anti depression pill whose side effects are more depressing than anything you could possibly be feeling before taking it.
Facecrook, Google et al. use the same idea: be the middle man, make the user come to you as the first thing when they need to contact someone, or want some information, etc..
Shouldn't we be putting all those middlemen on the B Ark?
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
A thousand pairs of eyeballs isn't a huge advertisment target.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
TV is passive entertainment. Site forums aren't, so your comparison isn't exactly accurate.
Besides having rules on directing continuity people to keep viewers in place for the ads though, TV companies use localisation, CGI to alter advert content, higher sound volume during the adbreaks, adverts during the programmes themselves (not counting the product placement) and they crop the programmes' lengths to suit rigid advertisement times.
And none of that even mentions the lengths they'll go to censor writers, commission programmes for the braindead and shuffle their schedules around in direct competition with each other - just to pander to the advertisers.
Oh yeah, and in Ireland and the U.K. you're required by law to pay for a TV licence to watch that crap.
If they acted like that on your favourite website, would you still use it?
Long term successful products on computers do not empower users
I don't think that makes any sense, and your "arguments" are not actually arguments.. there is very little that you can do in Linux that you cannot also do in Windows or Mac OS if you know what you're doing. Certainly greater than 99.9999% of computer users will never even write their own drivers, let alone go deeper than that. Google and Facebook are both quite empowering services in their own way.. and as long as there are alternatives out there, then they do not actually take away any power or choice from the end user.
Users are empowered by the applications that they can run, not by understanding how they work. I don't need to blueprint my car's engine to be able to get to work in the morning.
which is totally what she said
And this is somebody else's site. This is where people go for information, and part of that information is that you can get banned from a site for mentioning ad-block. So, if they can censor their site, then we can go to "our site" and discuss how that's a shitty thing to do.
Well the simple fact is advertising executives have MUCH more experience than you in ascertaining the play-off between annoying/distracting and revenue clicks. And I guess your gut feeling loses out to their terabytes of data.
It's more like banning people who suggest buying an ad-detecting and automatic ad-skipping machine.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
really? I don't see any ads on slashdot.
What if AdBlock was modified so that it would load the ads but not display them? In this way the website would be paid by the advertiser and you would not have to look at the ads. AdBlock could even fake a click on a few ads, just to be nice.
AdBlock should load the ads in a low priority thread after all the other elements of the web page was loaded. This would maximize the bandwith usage. Of course, all of this would be disabled if you pay per byte transferred.
Was this before or after a "shaking dialog" put you into a seizure?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
And the site owners pay for their bandwidth and own their content, they have no reason to give it to you for free.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Me too! Whenever I see a web ad my initial reaction is no longer annoyance, but rather surprise. "What is this?" I think to myself. "Lo, this foreign thing is so incongruous! Here I am on a web page about one topic, and there is this strange part of the page about a totally unrelated topic!" Then half a second later my brain realizes what the thing is, and then the annoyance sets in.
Also, pages with ads have an odd "shape". I'm not used to seeing big tall column-shape images next to whatever I'm reading, but that's the shape of most pages when not using AdBlock. Or, when I load a forum page, I can normally see the first and maybe second posts when using AdBlock, but if not then there is an ad there and I have to scroll to see the posts. It's strange that way.
I am so incredibly happy that ad filtering is possible with the internet. I literally never watch TV or listen to the radio now, because of ads. I still watch TV shows on Netflix (live or on disc) and I still enjoy radio programs as podcasts -- but I just can't or won't agree to the previous broadcast model for programming.
Escapist is not alone. EA bans anyone who talks about the Better Business Bureau and removes their posts. I recently, after 40 days (irony?) got a free copy of Mass Effect 2 Collector's Edition after turning them in to the BBB (something I've never done before) for their shitty Bad Company 2 launch and the fact that several weeks after launch, and after I had talked a friend in to buying the game for the whole 15 minutes I had been able to play it, it was still broken and took HOURS to connect to a server to the point where sane people walked away and wanted their money back.
I had purchased from STEAM so they told me I was fucked because they wouldn't talk to me since it had been a digital download (that they had to distribute to Valve, got their cut of the money for, and I paid full retail for; something else I rarely do). I appealed to the BBB, I guess because they didn't want the 3 year mark on their record they finally ponied up a game after refusing to refund anything, going through 3 tiers of tech support idiots and going full circle when they tried to "troubleshoot" my connection after already offering an alternate title.
I think people who are dicked on releases like this (in this case, the game was fine, it was their horrible MP authentication and Punk Buster server fiascos) should absolutely be compensated by the company at fault so they have a deterrent from pulling that shit again.
I should say, I haven't even opened the box for ME:2, I may well sell it, and I haven't touched BF:BC2 since either. Fuck EA, the Escapist, and all those like them. This will probably be marked OT but it seemed relevant enough, and happened recently enough (I just got the replacement game yesterday, after literally 40 days of going back and forth between EA and the BBB mediator every couple days) that I thought I'd share my story of woe.
You do. Don't use the internet, or at least the advertisement-supported sites.
You see, if enough people take up a site's bandwidth without generating ad impressions, the ad companies pay less for their ad-space, and each visitor, on average, produces less income for the site. The site's gotta keep itself afloat (or in some cases, profitable), so it has to try harder to increase the number of ad impressions, or increase the value of ad impressions (e.g. making them more obnoxious). So, what ad-blocking does is bring this sense of "balance" to a select few, at the expense of making everyone else's experience extremely "unbalanced".
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
TV companies actually factor in how many people will skip the ads, or channel surf whilst they are on. TV channels have complex models which tell them if X number are watching, Y will likely see the ad. It's a medium based on potential and not provable results. Comparing adverts on a website to TV is like comparing apples to asparagus.
I have some machines with adblock and some without. I guess I've gotten used to ads, because they don't seem to bother me that much anymore. But one thing that does drive me crazy is when a page stops loading, and the status bar says something along the lines of, "Waiting for ads.clickme.net". That's asking a little much.
Evil is the money of root.
And that's on sites where people spend thousands of dollars modifying their cars, but are insulted when the site owner asks for $12/yearly toward maintaining the site where they got the info on how to modify their cars...
Frankly, I don't think that the unwashed masses have any concept of how much it can cost to keep a site running. At all. You turn on your computer and all this stuff is there by magic. Something simple in a header like the total cost of the site and how much is needed to keep it going could make an impression, and I've seen it work, but it really depends on the site genre imo.
Reply to That ||
slashdot have allowed me to turn off adverts, but I haven't.
Same here - I even removed AdBlock after a fit of guilt. I would like to ensure that my favourite content continues being made, and given that I only subscribe to one magazine and typically only read newspapers in airline lounges, thereby not increasing their reported circulation, viewing online advertising is pretty much the only way I can do that. Thing is, I don't mind even very direct advertising, as long as it has value to me.
Amazon's recommendation engine is a case in point. Their goal is pretty direct - sell me more stuff - but because the engine actually works, I have bought an absolute ton of stuff based on the Amazon recommendation. I even go in and refine the data so that Amazon can recommend even more stuff to me!
A counter-example are ads that appear over the top of content and need to be actively dismissed. Some of these are now HTML, not Flash, so just using flashblock doesn't stop them. I make a point of avoiding the products advertised, and if they get to be enough of an annoyance I might stop visiting the site that hosts them. I'm happy to view advertising and even to buy advertised products, but the ads have to keep out of my way.
" There is a rational explanation for everything. There is also an irrational one. "
And riding a power trip by abusing fantasy admin powers and putting down or banning any user who might show a little independent thought? Wow. Never seen that before....
Camping on quad since 1996.
If we are not allowed to talk about AdBlock plus, then lets talk about "document.write".
Most (probably all) ads are created with "document.write", so simply block "document.write". And enable "document.write" for the few sites that you really enjoy.
Add the following to "prefs.js" (seamonkey, firefox, ...):
user_pref("capability.policy.default.HTMLDocument.write", "noAccess");
... ");
user_pref("capability.policy.trusted.HTMLDocument.write", "sameOrigin");
user_pref("capability.policy.trusted.sites", "http://localhost http://forums.mozillazine.org/
user_pref("capability.policy.policynames", "trusted");
See http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/components/ConfigPolicy.html for more details ...
Good thing they've never heard of junkbuster or squid, eh?
Seriously, though. If advertisements had remained a small, unanimated banner at the top of a page, then blocking them would never have even been needed.
You dumbasses dug your own graves and started this ridiculous arms race, sucking down OUR bandwidth and CPU cycles with SHIT WE DON'T WANT TO SEE. Let's not even get started on how a lot of it is a malware vector!!
My computer, my browser. I will format content as *I* see fit. That was the whole point of HTML way back in the old days. Remember?
Recent studies indicate that it's a lot worse than that. Ads apparently have a measurable, and mostly negative, impact on human behaviour and emotions. For example, a recent study showed that people who were looking at certain fast food logos were more likely to drive faster than others who had not.
Advertisement is engineering gone far out of control. They've carefully looked for, and found, ways to get into your brain for several decades now. Only now are some studies being done about what the side effects of that forceful entry actually are.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Well, have you tried actually asking your users?
I run a free browsergame, and have for more than ten years now. It has never had any advertisement on it. Since I've been working a dot-coms and ISPs and such for most of that time, I've not paid much for hosting or domain names, etc. - but hardware isn't free, and after one upgrade I decided to open a PayPal account and ask for donations.
Ever since, I've received a steady stream that would more than cover the hosting fees for the amount of traffic it generates. And that is with me being perfectly honest that I don't really need it, and most of it won't be spent on the game since it simply doesn't cost that much.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Advertising execs aren't the ones who we're concerned about. It's the "Click the dancing monkey to win $100!" scams, or "Download smilies for your messenger app! Hear the sounds now! *GIGGLE FART SNORT SCREAM*" obnoxious Flash assaults on the senses which irritate us.
I typically browse with AdBlock enabled constantly, and whitelist sites I browse frequently. If I see one of these advertisements, I re-enable AdBlock. It's very effective.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
I also occassionally find ads useful.
For instance, I think there was this one back in 2001 that I gladly clicked. And, uh, gosh there might have been one more in there somewhere.
But the other several million that have only annoyed me have been totally useless.
Perhaps it would be great if I could see that one-in-ten-million ad, and none of the others, but I can't figure out how to do that, so I have to just block all of them.
(Speculatrix, this is not a criticism of you or your point. I am not trying to counter anything you said or start an argument. It seems to be impossible to reply to a comment on Slashdot without the parent thinking the reply is an attack.)
Shh. If you listen carefully, you can hear me playing sad music on the world's smallest violin
I know that most of you weren't even born yet, but there was a time when the internet had no advertising. And it did just fine.
"Monetizing your assets" is marketing bullshit-speak for "fleecing stupid people and annoying the rest". In fact, I own several websites right now that contain no advertising and get traffic. Any business that performs a service that's worth more than a pile of post-horse-oats can afford enough hardware and bandwidth to support thousands of users for less than they spend on getting the mats by the front door cleaned. And anybody who wants a personal site can do the same for less than the cost of a "value meal" at McDonalds.
And as bizarre as this seems, I could even post original content and have user interaction just like The Escapist and still charge nothing.
Not only do I recommend ad-block to my friends, I install ad-blocking proxy servers for businesses, because nowhere in the world is wasted time, money and bandwidth more apparent than in businesses that actually measure expenses and productivity. Employee wants to spend a little while looking for a new recipe for hummus? Great! Employee gets distracted and spends a half our down the rabbit hole with punch-the-monkey ads, not so great.
They can advertise all they want, but nobody is going to tell me that I have to:
And I guess your gut feeling loses out to their terabytes of data.
Nope. It doesn't. I consistently use Adblock anymore simply because the ads are annoying. If the ad exec's terabytes of data actually did overcome my gut feeling, I'd still be seeing ads, and I'm not. So, their terabytes of data lose with me every time.
Whether ad execs win with other people is of no concern to me. If they're crazy enough to watch all those annoying ads, so be it. I basically do the same with TV. Anything I want to watch I record on the DVR first and then ff through all the commercials.
If my wife is watching something I sit and pick the commercials apart by finding the logical fallacies they employ, or point out the incongruencies the ads expose in the product. I amuse myself with ads for prescription medicines by counting the number of fatal side effects the ad narrator lists. There's such a long list of serious side effects for most drugs that they have to digitally compress the voice overs to get the entire list mentioned in the time the ads run. Much of the time the drug's side effects are more serious than the condition it is supposed to cure.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
I didn't know what Escapist was until now... but my task for the day is to go sign up and post about adblock and get banned.
You could take it one step further... forget adblock... use RequestPolicy! It goes together with noscript like yogurt and cucumber. (no really...)
Just like noscript lets you selectively turn on scripts on a per site basis... RequestPolicy blocks and allows you to whitelist browser requests to other sites. This breaks more websites than noscript does to start, but, it allows for a really fine grained control, AND it voraciously blocks ads.
It also allows whitelisting from site to site. So, I can allow slashdot to ask my browser to load content from fsdn.com, but no other site is allowed until I give the ok. Other than that, it just works like noscript, collecting your custom white list.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
On what platform do you learn about computers?
@Myopic no problem, I see your point. yes, the advertisers probably push 10000's of adverts my way for every one I click. I agree it's not very effective, and if I didn't have a 100Mb/s service at work I'd probably block a lot more, I only have 8M adsl at home and on reflection I probably block a lot more adverts to make better use of bandwith. I rarely boot windows for browsing internet, I use noscript on firefox on linux, so that probably also reduces the nuisance of adverts too.
FAIL: I would have thought, as a slashdotter, you were more interested in the facts. Do some homework: The banks were bullied into lowering their lending standards by left-wing idealists intent on equal opportunities at any cost.
Ah, no, that would be your collassal FAIL for swallowing right-wing talking points and fiction hook, line, and sinker and calling them "facts".
This crisis had nothing to do with the tiny minority of sub-prime loans disbursed under federal fair lending requirements. These banks were not "bullied" into anything--they aggressively sold sub-prime loans to far less debtworthy recipients than specified in any federal fair lending statutes, and did so for one very simple reason: profit. Not long term profits for the bank, but for short term paper profits off the back of irresponsibly low interest rates that translated into large bonuses for the Bankers and Traders involved, and then packaging up the toxicity and selling it onward as CDOs and CDSes that were fraudulantly sold to investors in a climate of no oversight, little to no regulation, and a business model of raking in the profits and shedding the liability as fast as possible...initially onto investers, then ultimately onto the shareholders while the main culprits pocketed millions and made for the hills. I work in this industry (for the investment arm of a large bank BTW), and there is nothing "poor" or "bullied" about these banks...this is pure, unadulterated, and unregulated greed--raw, freewhelling free markets just as the Libertarians and "small 'L' libertarian Republicans tout as the answer to all of society's ills.
And guess what, it had results that were entirely predictable to anyone thinking outside of the right-wing dogma of the Chicago School of Ecomonics (which seems to require debunking about once every generation or so), and the right-wint Libertarian and Republican economic policies it inspires.
It's amazing the level of audacity the right has, to try and place the blame on their successors, whom they've left to clean up their mess. I'm not a particular fan of Obama, but to try and blame him for cleaning up Bush's economic mess (and seeing Bush's bailout through to the end, no less), and to blame a statistically insignificant number of fair lending loans as the cause of this crisis is absurd to the point it beggars belief, and belies a willful ignorance of the facts that appears to stem more from political (some might say 'religious') dogma than any fundamental inability to grasp the basics of economics and credit markets. Fair lending loans weren't the cause of this crisis, nor were the policies that put them in place. The cause was a combination of low interest rates creating a real-estate bubble, and investors who were lied to about the underlying risk and value of the credit instruments they were sold, which in turn created a lending frenzy whose enormity far outstripped anything mandated by government, by orders of magnitude in size and risk. In short, the very CDOs and CDSes that have Goldman in the sights of the SEC right now (and very rightly so, I might add).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Leech? Why would you self apply such a term?
If they want control, they should exercise control. Sites can be made non-public. Sites that detect ad blocking and don't display could be designed (essentially forcing javascript etc), Ad systems could be developed that inject static content into the page and are transparent to the browser.
Why don't they do that? Because it would piss users off if it became less reliable or didn't work in certain circumstances. They don't do it because of server load, and a number of other reasons. However, none of that is anyone elses problem.
You should have as much sympathy as you do for ice harvesters when you buy a freezer for your kitchen. You do feel for the ice man don't you?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
AdBlock is totally awesome becaQWfl;a,$25DFtgNO CARRIER
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
/. has plenty of ads. The only reason I don't see them is because I'm given the option not to display them
Read that a few more times until you figure out why I’m chuckling right now.
Slashdot understands that users are more important than ads.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
A thousand pairs of eyeballs isn't a huge advertisment target.
This is one of those points about internet advertising that I don't quite understand. Sure the number of eyeballs reached is fewer for most websites than most traditional media outlets but they're tremendously more targeted eyeballs. At least when you're advertising on the web you can know a lot better that you're reaching the right thousand people.
Having "rich web content" implemented using a plugin is really convenient, as it is self-contained, separate from the rest of the site and easy to disable by default. Right now I can simply install flashblock and disable animated GIFs, and not have to deal with 95% of the obtrusive ads, while still supporting sites with reasonable ad policies.
As annoying ads move further towards using open standards like Javascript, DOM, CSS, SVG and Canvas I have no clue how I am going to selectively block it. It will be using the same tools as the legitimate portions of the website, and also opens the door to advertisements not being spatially segregated into a single area. You already see this with floating ads and it is only going to get worse. Given how many sites need things like Javascript for legitimate reasons, I can't turn it off indiscriminately. I have tried using noscript, and got sick of half the sites on the web not working. I got sick of having to fill out every form twice because I got to the end only to discover that it requires javascript to submit, and enabling javascript inevitably reinitialized (cleared) the form.
I have the feeling that it will become futile to try and block these ads, so my granularity will change to boycotting entire sites that include them.
This is the exact reason I got AdBlock as well. Every time a page would be stuck loading, I'd look down at the status bar to see what the issue was. 99% of the time it was 1 ad that was holding up the rest of the page.
Unskippable isn't bad, brings back MST3K memories. Their ads are something terrible, though. The same ad at the beginning of every video (without AdBlock on), there's a reason folks block.
Option-Shift-K.
Exactly. One of the car forums I frequented was bought out by some company that only ran forums. They loaded the site with ads and started banning people for ridiculous reasons. So, of course, one intrepid member simply set up their own forum, the only ads coming from sponsoring companies, and a majority of the most knowledgeable members went over there. However, you'd be surprised at how hard it is to get people to move over. The new site is a better forum in every way, but the momentum of the ad-riddled, near unbrowsable site makes it hard to compete with.
Unfortunately, I think products like AdBlock actually do a disservice to web sites that have few ads to begin with. These web sites are run by people who actually care about the community, usually running the site out of pocket or barely breaking even, but to your average user with web block, the site riddled with ads is no different.
So, what ad-blocking does is bring this sense of "balance" to a select few, at the expense of making everyone else's experience extremely "unbalanced".
The flaw in this argument is that "few" use ad-blocking software. In practice, I find that it is "many", and may even be "most" recently.
Windows users (Vista, 7 32-bit): Start, notepad - ctrl+shift+enter; click yes at UAC; File - Open: c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
Add:
127.0.0.1 escapistmagazine.com
Save. Close notepad.
Linux users: You're linux users. pick an editor of your choice (not my war) and run it as a superuser to edit (usually) /etc/hosts
Add:
127.0.0.1 escapistmagazine.com
Save. Close %editor%.
In before baby and bathwater commentary.
I lose nothing by ditching that site.
Zero Punctuation is not funny at all.
The rest of the site isn't of any use to me.
And now, they can ban me for telling people how to permanently fix their ad problems.
Not that I disagree with the spirit of what you say, but this is one of the reasons that I *DON'T* use Firefox - it's still entirely too easy for one bad site/script/flash applet/whatever to bring down the whole browser. It might crash, or it might hang, or it might just run *REALLY* slowly, but you can't do anything about it until you kill the offending tab, which typically (in such cases) requires killing the entire browser. If it's a crash, then you don't even have a chance - everything goes away, and you hope the session restore works and you didn't have too much info entered in a form.
IE8 and Chrome both do an admirable job of avoiding this problem via per-tab process isolation - that is, each tab runs as a completely separate process, and can be killed individually. If one of them crashes, the rest of the browser is almost never affected. It's very simple and straightforward (from a user perspective - talking to a Chrome developer it become clear that it's non-trivial from a programmer perspective), works wonderfully with multi-core systems, and honestly should be the *expected* behavior for a tabbed browser.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Ad systems could be developed that inject static content into the page and are transparent to the browser
Actually if they did this, I'd have less of an issue with ads. My big beef is when a page view is held up because the 3rd party ad server in outer Mongolia has a 5 sec ping time. If the ads were served by the site itself, it would mean the site admins had some level of control or review.
True marketing is about making a connection with your customer. Better Homes and Gardens doesn't take ads sight unseen from unknown parties. Web site interested in maintaining a community would be wise maintain some element of editorial control over their branding.
If I'm shoving ads to doubleclick et.al. and paying for eyeballs, do I really care about to whom I'm advertising? If I accept ads from those same bozos, what does it say about how I value my visitors?
Truth: If it's not one thing, it's another
You do know that the president isn't the king, right?
You also know that the Republicans had a veto proof majority, right?
You know they pretty much state the would over ride any veto, right?
In stead of vetoing it, he got them to add parts so people other then the rich would benefit.
The government is a little more complex then ' the president did it'.
"Just write down his name, wait a month, and then mod his posts into oblivion.
Ah the Fox approach to 'fair and balanced'
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
> The readership consumes content, and in return gives you the eyeballs that
> you sell to the advertisers.
Do they have to be human, or will any kind do? For the right price I;m sure I could arrange for Countryside Hides to ship you a truckload of cow eyeballs.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Apart from the guy's behaviour, that Onion article is pretty much dead-on. His reasoning for not owning a TV is pretty much the same as mine, except for that I spend my time on computers instead...
I am annoyed by the number of cookies all the ad-servers try to set. I'm sure my cookie blacklist is filled at least 90% with ad-servers.
No, Ars actually went about doing exactly the wrong way. Ars only asked when the backlash got to the point where it had taken over discussion on the site.
The first thing they did was block content for ABP users, then started banning people who started asking what was up.
They then became rude and condescending towards users who criticized the way in which the action was carried out, to the point that some Ars staff were publicly stating that they were sorely disappointed in the attitudes of other Ars staff.
Within 24 hours, people had figured out how to bypass the Ars-side ABP anti-filter and had posted instructions. (Consider your audience, Ars!)
Only then, after Ars' anti ABP measure become moot, did Ars come back and "ask nicely" which was accompanied by Asian/Jewish/Catholic mother-in-law levels of guilt tripping.
I was one of the ones who pointed out Slashdot's "Disable Advertising" checkbox - the day I saw this is the day I whitelisted /. for most of my machines and signed up for a subscription. One discrete, unobtrusive note was enough to remind me that I was adblocking, that bandwidth isn't free, and that I enjoyed the site enough to pay for it. That one little note generated a lot of good will from me towards Slashdot, which had been flagging.
That stunt Ars pulled, OTOH, along with the commentary of Ars staffers, has essentially destroyed all of my good will towards them, good will that took the better part of a decade to develop.
I had previously subscribed to Ars but I will NOT be renewing my subscription.
No, I like my current strategy -- if the site is willing to serve up the ads from the same server/domain that I'm visiting, and as long as it's not heavily animated or flash, I'll accept the ad.
If it comes from a 3rd party site, is delaying my browser loading, or trying to launch popups ... it gets blocked. Back in the day when popups and popunders and all sorts of drive-by shit was being installed on peoples machines, we started looking for best practices to keep ourselves safe from it. Disabling half of the crap that advertisers want to use was one of them.
A site whose revenue model requires me to be running my browser in an insecure mode is hosed from the beginning, and thinks I owe them far more trust than they deserve. And, the advertisers are paying the sites to show ads -- they're not paying me. If advertisers would like to arrange to pay me to view their ads, maybe we can work something out.
I view it the same as the cable company deciding that I shouldn't be able to skip ads on my PVR. Just because you charged the advertiser to sell the ad, doesn't mean that confers any obligation on me to watch it.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And if you keep that up, what users will you have left to block? Ad-blocking is becoming more and more prevalent and thanks to the Streisand effect, once non-blockers find out about the banning of blockers, they're more likely to start blocking either out of enlightened self-interest or a desire for revenge against you. So you block them too, and then you've blocked everyone, and you have nobody left to view your ads as the users have all left for sites that treat them with more value and respect and you're left high and dry, wanting for ad revenue that never comes because no impressions are being made. Websites need their users more than users need the websites.
Help protect civil rights from abuse by the TSA - visit TSA News Blog.
http://www.tsanewsblog.com
Only 10% of your life is being assulted by ads!? I envy you brother...
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
On the other hand, Slashdot has a right to grouse about it on their own site if they want! Everyone's got rights all around. ;-)
I second that, everyone do what they want so long as it doesn't come to threats destruction fists and bullets. In fact I would make that the one-line constitution and we'd be better off.
I would imagine it does come to fists and bullets in some rare cases, but teaching people to ease up on the level of hate spewed on the internet would make a far better world to live in.
Being a spelling & grammar Nazi is a sign you do not poses the intelligence to contribute to the conversation
A company with a business model that ignores basic physics of what it operates in, represses the fact that it’s about to die, and thereby moves itself into death in the first place... News at 11. ^^
This is no conflict, since everyone gets what he wants:
1. The Escapist is happy, because everyone liking to decide himself what he requests from their servers (eg. not ads) will go away. (What they don’t think about, is that nobody will be left.)
2. Other sites with reality-based business models will gain more clients, so that they can offer a better service (*hint*), and thereby gain even more clients.
3. We will get new, better sites, that adhere to our conditions (=reality!).(But since nobody at such a site will work for free, we’ll have to ultimately pay something for it. Especially for something special.)
In one sentence: Escapist: You’re not special.
You got nothing to offer, that somebody else can’t supply for equal or better conditions. Unless you change that, you can’t make demands, even when it looks to like it to you.
How this all will work? Well, if you knew how little money companies actually get out of those ads (1000 clicks was 50€ about 5 years ago, and a >3% click rate was considered good. [Internal and accidental clicks included!] Now we have ad blockers and fallen prices. You do the math.)
So if you’d pay perhaps 5€ a month more on your Internet bill, that would pay for all sites you could possibly ever visit. They would most likely even get more than with ads. (The problem I see with billing it in that generic flat-rate fashion, is that not all content/information has the same value. But the bill could also come from a payment service provider, who would have to adhere to strict privacy rules and the bank secret, so your ISP does not get even more monopolistic power.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
the Zero Punctuation videos are hilarious
Love it. I also watch the ones by the Loading Ready Run guys. Rebecca Mayes and Moviebob aren't bad, hit and miss but it's only a few minutes each anyway. The other videos? Not so much. Game Dogs (Non-jokes that run on too long, and then there was the facepalm-worthy reference to "ASC2 art".) and I Hit It with My Axe (Fully-dressed pornstars playing D&D - how is this different from watching fully-dressed ANYONE playing D&D? It's like watching someone do a crossword with more bad acting and dice rolling.) are just... painful.
Articles are similarly hit-and-miss, but there's a few authors there that are consistently good.
Overall there's enough good that I paid 'em ten bucks for the year and now I don't see ads anymore.
I think it depends on how it is implemented. Google is run almost exclusively on ad revenue. Economy of scale; the size of the user base, the size of the employee roster and the size of the ads themselves. There are obviously magic ratios which if are not adhered to are bound to fail.
But I still agree with you. That magic ratio shouldn't be as it is. It should be much more forgiving.
I think a much better way to make things work is to reduce the amount of money a person needs to survive in the real world. If we take some of the larger living expenses, like house payments, for instance, and slash those by a huge percentage, then people would be able to engage in activities with lower financial reward but higher spiritual gain. The world wasn't always as difficult to live in. Only twenty years ago, it was possible to rent whole houses in my area for $300. Now you're lucky if you can get a single room with shared facilities for that much.
This rise in cost is NOT solely a function of inflation. If basic inflation were entirely to blame for the rise in such costs, then it wouldn't matter because people's income would rise in kind, but there is a total non-parity between the two. When I was a kid, only my father worked, and he was able to raise three kids and pay for our entire house by his mid-30's on a mid-level engineer's salary. That was a very common story back then, but today most 35 year-olds are in debt up to their ears and hardly anybody can afford to be full-time stay at home parents. There are clearly other factors at work.
If we can address these factors, then the world will become much, much better and silly stories like this one about ad-blocking would become totally unnecessary.
-FL
Cracked did the same thing, and as a matter of fact, many many moderators walked out because of it. http://www.matthewnicol.com/adblocksummary.html here is some screenshot stuff http://www.matthewnicol.com/furtherinsanity.html and a bit more.
that I've ever seen are at GlockTalk.com I frequently browse with a netbook at 800x480 and the site is just unusable. Firefox with Adblock and Remove It Permanently tame it fairly easily.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
They will never receive another dime from me.
Fuck Ajit Pai
As pointed out elsewhere, yes, they CAN do that. And if a small enough subset of their visitor population is using ad-blockers, it might not even hurt them much.
OTOH, if they underestimate the size of that subset, it becomes a foot+bullet situation.
I haven't found a huge pushback against relatively unobtrusive ads that are reasonably tasteful, especially if the site owner explains why they were introduced
Wrap the ad code in a div with this style.
Now block.png will be displayed under the ads. Make sure it is the same size as the ad frame, and explains why you have adverts. If they use Adblock, they will see it and hopefully turn it off for your site.
Or, if you have a sick sense of humour explain how your kids are crying because they are hungry, and they are hungry because you can't buy them food and that is because of decreased ad revenue so you have to beat them. Maybe make a faux ad with pictures of crying children.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I refuse to run an adblocker, the sites I go to need the income. I refuse to go to sites with obnoxious ads, they don't deserve my visit anyway.
The AC I replied to says /. does fine without ads. While we are given the option to opt out of seeing them (in my case, I imagine it's a reward for my most excellent karma), there are still plenty of people (especially those who aren't logged in) that do see them.
I think Adblock and NoScript are a good response to malads, but in general should be used with a huge amount of discrimination on the part of the end user.
I do think the website in question for the submission was extremely heavy handed in their response. A better response would be to have forced that ad to load on their own machine to see what the issue was and/or directly contact the ad service to figure out what's going on. That being said, it is their site and if they want to be jerks...well, they might find themselves without any visitors.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
some of the ads lag my system too much for that to be a good consolation.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
The other two responses are right--you're just changing presentation, not the content itself.
To answer your question more broadly, copyright law concerns itself almost entirely with distribution. If you buy a copy of "Harry Potter" and take it home and scratch out half the words, technically you've altered a copyrighted work. But unless you try to redistribute it, no one is going to care.
Your ISP is redistributing the Web sites that they carry across their wires, so yeah, they would probably get in trouble if they started altering the code on its way to you.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
without javascript enabled, most websites are completely broke now-a-days (none of mine, fwiw, but I have few visitors).
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I guess it depends on your opinion of the original content (and what you consider "original"). I find most of their original content to suck horribly. The good stuff they have, IMO, was stuff they borged (ZP started on YouTube, Unskippable was a contest entry, and There Will Be Brawl was 3rd party).
The problem is the idea that people should pay for something they can get for free (legally).
If I can download adblock, privoxy, or proximitron(RIP), or hell, if I can strategically place strips of duct tape on my monitor, then the value of what they are offering drops, so they need to be giving something else for the money.
And they do. Their little membership club gives access to HD streams, RSS, early access, etc. If that stuff is worth it to a user, they should absolutely pay up.
AFAIC, the site devalues them with policies like this. To me, it carries the stink of "paid memberships are worth as much as ad-blocking" which, as already figured, is $0.
If you are reliant on your ad impressions to support your site, perhaps you should rethink your business model. If you look at ad impressions as a serious source of income, perhaps you should rethink your business model. If you think your 'content' is really worth stable income from ad impressions, perhaps you should rethink your business model.
Whats I'm saying is, perhaps you should rethink your business model.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
It's not a flaw. My argument doesn't rely on few people using ad-blocking software.
The internet on the other hand...
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Advertising executives are professional circle jerk bullshitters, nothing more. They pretend to ascertain the play-off but have very little comprehension of reality. Buzzwords kids, buzzwords.
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
word (:
Which reminds me, I need to whitelist /. as I am using that option atm.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Not quite. The cable company accepts that you can change the channel or turn off the TV (well, they don't really have a choice). At least there's some effort on your part to be put in, and for enough people, the effort of changing channel and watching the time until the program resumes is as bad or worse than the ads. They would object to an always-on-by-default silent automatic ad-blocking machine. That would quite literally ruin their business model.
OK, maybe not cable, but certainly free-to-air. If such a device hit the market and was effective well, FTA would be essentially finished.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Actually, it's not uncommon for talk shows (or other "live to tape" programs) to say "we'll be back in two minutes" or what-not. (Chuck Woolery is famous for "We'll be back in two and two", for instance.)
Well, for a start, this isn't my business model. I don't have a business model. But, nonetheless, even though I'm purely from the consumer end of the internet, I can still see the hypocrisy of claiming a business model is flawed, while still using and relying upon its fruits.
Perhaps it is flawed, but that doesn't mean there's anything better.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
They are going to make more money off of people not reading their ads than people not being on their website at all
My point was, Slashdot not only realises that users are more important than ads, it actually rewards users who achieve the status of being positive contributors to the site by providing a way for them to turn the ads off.
In hindsight (after re-reading AC’s post), he was making a joke, not referring to the ad-disabling feature if a user has good or excellent karma, so my post wasn’t really as relevant as I thought, but still relevant to your comment.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
"Facecrook"? Really?
And to think I was taking you seriously before that line. You might as well have referenced Winblows and MacO$.
Last post!
I'm betting that most of the staff of this site have DVR / T!V0 type equipment in their homes. I'll also wager that they don't watch every commercial that is available on said equipment. Could possibly have been a determining factor in purchasing that equipment. With that being said, what's the difference? Someone paid for the commercials to be run. In return, they expect viewers to watch them. Sometimes that doesn't happen. Technology enables the viewer to choose what they watch. Am I missing something?
At least somebody pointed him out. He's here like once a week.
www.theonion.com/articles/area-man-constantly-mentioning-he-doesnt-own-a-tel site:slashdot.org
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
Any business thats sole source of income is advertisements is fail. It will never last long.
Yeah, like magazines and television.
Well, the bans appear to have been reversed because of the uproar (I wonder if the fact that one of the banned was a paying member figured into that equation).
The part I found amusing is that the ban-happy admin then admits to using adblocking software himself...
When the Sea Shepherds decided that terrorism was a valid way of combating whaling, I stopped contributing to them.
Terrorism? Not even close. Pull your head out of your ass.
Organizations have been trying to play the politics game for decades with NOTHING to show for it. The only things saving whales right now are the economy and last-minute regulations pushed through to protect species as they face extinction. Those ships are engaged in blatantly illegal commercial whaling in international waters. Governments choose to ignore it. Civilians, then, under international law, have a legal right and moral obligation to intervene.
Stalking ships involved in criminal activity? Not terrorism.
Filming and documenting the actions of ships involved in criminal activity? Not terrorism.
Throwing bottles of butyric acid* onto the decks of ships involved in criminal activity? Not terrorism.
Ramming ships involved in criminal activity? Not terrorism.
Boarding ships involved in criminal activity? Not terrorism.
Are these actions dangerous? Yes. Fuck, just being that far south is dangerous in itself. But they are legal and justified under the circumstances. It isn't terrorism, it isn't even piracy, it is sanctified naval enforcement.
Watch "Whale Wars" if you haven't already. You need to see two things. First, what actually happens out there. The horrific nature of whaling is something you have to see to comprehend. Second, that the Sea Shepherds are woefully ill-equipped, inexperienced, and incompetent. But they are the only ones trying to make a difference. When politics fails, when the public loses interest, when governments choose to ignore a problem, what is there left to do but take action into your own hands?
Do some research. Look at the bullshit politics. Watch an entire herd of whales slaughtered in one of the most inhumane ways imaginable. If you can still tell me you don't support the Sea Shepherds, I have no respect for you as a human being. Period.
* Butyric acid is derived from rotten butter and cheese. It is harmless. About as acidic as beer. Nontoxic, but a mild irritant with extended skin or eye contact (4+ hours on sensitive skin), and completely safe to ingest. At best, it is a mild stink bomb useful in wet conditions. The goal is to force the crew off of the kill floor and to "spoil" the whale meat. Crew members are not specifically not targeted.
Playing devil's advocate...
I pay for my bandwidth I'll choose what I serve, including page elements. If you block ads, then I will block content.
And that's entirely fair. I've seen quite a few sites that say variations of "you need JavaScript enabled to view this site". Sometimes I enable JavaScript, sometimes I don't. The site is entirely within it's rights to limit who gets in, same as I'm free to limit what I'll accept.
So now the accepted pronunciation for "Escapist" is "asshat".
Just because you can do something doesn't mean it's a good idea.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
"the Zero Punctuation videos are hilarious"
If I had mod points today I'd mark you +5 Insightful and parent would be Flamebait for saying "I couldn't see much value over at the Escapist site anyway"
IMHO the Zero Punctuation videos are the funniest videos the interwebs have to offer. Anyone that does not give them at least some credit for being funny is Flamebait.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
"I've started using ad blocker, and I haven't turned back."
I guess I'm the lone weirdo that still doesn't block ads. I've never had a problem with an ad significantly slowing down Chrome so I don't see the need for it. Also I feel a bit better that at least I'm trying to help the website because if everyone used Adblock the internet would be a very different place.... but then maybe it needs to be. Some of these people that live off their blogs shouldn't be. Slashdot existed before banner ads, having users promote articles instead of depending on a full-time staff posting what they want you to see.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
When the company supplying content is paying part of my bandwidth bill(which I'm already paying my ISP for), then they can dictate what ads I see. Until then, ads go poof.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yeah, like magazines and television.
Magazines have been on the decline the last 30 years(along with newspapers). And TV has been on the decline since the early 90's when computers became cheap and available. The only people that religiously watch TV for the most part are the older folks, and even most of them are shifting away as they become more tech savvy. An interesting bit about the last sentence, I recently went to a nursing home to fix a computer(only friends/family/fof) and so on now; but nearly every person there either had a netbook, laptop, or PC that they were on and using. The TV room was empty, and the home supplied WAP's locally in the building.
I know in my last law class the only people that watched TV were parents with kids, and some of the others who liked a few rare reality TV shows. Out of 40 people, 4 watched TV religiously. 30 didn't at all, and the other 6 were in between. Those people were aged 18-45.
Om, nomnomnom...
...let me try and explain: The Escapist used to be a great site where the staff and mod--they used to have only one, and people still miss him--would treat users with respect, would argue with us, would let us disagree with them. They also put out a really great web magazine committed to exploring the more intellectual ways of appreciating video games.
So they're riding on a lot of built-up goodwill from a period that does not exist anymore. Something like this never could have happened on The Escapist a few years ago. Things have been changing, and they seem to have changed a WHOLE lot: I know they've been acting like spoiled children lately, but this seemed too crazy even for them.
A while back, I made a post defending software piracy as the equivalent of Ragnar Danneskjold's piracy in Atlas Shrugged because the video game industry keeps asking for tax breaks, which is what the 'looters' are doing in that book: the CEO is a big fan of Objectivism, and the whole forum community used to have great, civil discussions about all kinds of political topics. Well, my thread was locked for no reason at all. I didn't complain because I liked the site and the people running it so much.
That's why people are thanking the mods for taking the boot off their throat: like me back then, they don't realize just how much the place has changed, that the website that used to invite their users into a discussion of everything now bans first, asks questions later, and wants people to think they're the good guys for lifting the bans of people who discussed a topic no sane mod would ban people for discussing in the first place.
This mod Kuliani is the one who dealt with my permaban a few months ago. He gave me a garbage explanation back then, and never responded to my reply. I thought maybe it was just me: I'd run afoul of the 'new' (now the old) moderators back when they first replaced their original mod. I see now that it's more about this guy being a complete jerk who thinks because he was lucky enough to become the 'community manager' or whatever on a site that had the smarts to hire Yahtzee, that somehow he's the Yahtzee of Mods; I mean, really, what was with that little 'dialog' he wrote? Talk about getting high on you own power!
Here's my "browsing preference advice": read it with all the ads blocked. After my treatment by The Escapist, where a few mods with a grudge finally got their wish in banning me and staff members I'd had frequent conversations with for years did nothing, not even give me an explanation, I stopped reading.
Now that I know they are this irrational about people reading their site with the ads blocked, I'll be there for Yahtzee everytime he comes out. Maybe I'll even check out some of their other stuff and enjoy the free bandwith.
I agree. It's their site, and they should be entitled to run it as they choose. Users are entitled to use it according to their conditions or not at all. If this site has annoying advertisements, stop visiting. It will do a whole hell of a lot more harm to the site by leaving than it will by continuing to be there, participating in the community, running up the hit and page view numbers and costing him fractions of a penny by blocking his ad. And hell, maybe it will even have sent a message in the process.
The proper response for the admins should have been to make a simple post: "Thank you for the report, we'll do what we can to get this advertisement removed from rotation on our website." And then they should have done so. The users shouldn't immediately jump on "ZOMG BLOCK THE ADS AND DEPRIVE THE SITE OF ITS REVENUE!" bandwagon as if everybody in the world is happy to work for free. Instead everybody on both sides acts like nothing but self-serving wanks who depend on each other but don't feel that they do, and the Slashdot article is filled with nothing but the same.
Sometimes both parties are to blame; there is enough blame to go around. Sometimes the proper course of action is for both sides to realize they're being immature brats and work toward a mutually-beneficial solution instead of resorting to adolescent tantrum.
The admins certainly escalated the problem well beyond where it needed to go; if they were really that paranoid about the word(s?) "AdBlock" escaping they could have deleted the posts, posted their own "we're handling it" or even a more in-depth "we need the ad revenue" explanation and left it there. The users didn't help the situation either. If everybody had simply kept their cool for a few minutes and acted responsibly, everybody would have walked away happy.
Apparently that concept is nearly completely gone from the world.
and appreciated (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Because seriously, that's what The Escapist forum claims to be: The Internet's version of the Lighthouse of Alexandria I agree: no forum should treat its users badly or be run by whiny little mods, but when a forum makes some grandiose claim to being a bright shining example of enlightenment and then acts like this, that's not only behaving badly, that even worse.
For some value of 'most'. It's all depends on what sites you are visiting.
Quick way to get 30% Funny 70% Troll: defend Opera browser on
That's what I said.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
I've always feared the networks timing all their commercials to be on during the same intervals, so no matter witch of their stations you were watching they would be selling you something.
horror vacui
It's less than that - some of those RVs are now in junkyards for various reasons. :) The good news is that the site can't really grow a certain point, since it is such a small market. Hopefully the max size will be within my means. :)
"I believe that spending 10% of your life being assaulted by advertising is not a good way to live."
Wow, I wish it was only 10%. I was listening to talk radio this morning, and it is seriously 50% ad time now. 10 minutes of talk, 5 minutes of adds. And even during the talk time, the hosts often hock products or partners.
TV isn't 50% yet, but its getting close. A few channels, like MTV I bet are already at 50% ad time.
Between add blocking on the internet, DVR's for TV, and people switching the radio channel, you'd think that new funding models would start to creep up. Or advertisers would realize that sometimes less is more. Make your add funny, amusing, and short, and I might not change the channel!.
Hulu is a good example of this. 15-30 second add every 5-10 minutes is something I don't even bother to turn down or ignore. If it were 5 minutes of commercials, thats guaranteed to make me do something else for 5 minutes.
I tell ya, the first person that manages to create a real all encompassing media store (Internet site partners, TV, radio, clips, music, cable, etc..) and let you pick and choose an advertising free package for a single monthly price is going to be a billionaire.
I'd probably pay upwards of 200 dollars a month if I had access to parts of the internet, cable, tv, music, movies, etc.. for no additional cost, and no advertising. All the media store would have to do is split my 200 dollars amongst whatever sections of my selection I actually watched/listened to and give some percent to the producers.
There are more branches of english than just American-English
Divide a cake by zero. Is it still a cake?
... and I use AdBlock against my OWN site because I can't stand the sometimes interminable delays caused by some of the lousy crap that sponsors have buried in their ads.
I can understand sites needing to make enough money to keep the servers running, so I allow ads on many sites I visit, but if the delays and hang-ups get too bad, they are BLOCKED.
(On my site I try to keep the delays minimal, but when administering a sometimes very fast moving set of forums, I just cannot put up with even fairly short delays.)
On the other hand, the site also is well within their rights to block people blocking their ads.
I don't think they blocked them from viewing the site, only banned them as users on their forums.
Well the simple fact is advertising executives have MUCH more experience than you in ascertaining the play-off between annoying/distracting and revenue clicks. And I guess your gut feeling loses out to their terabytes of data.
Well, well, well... Of course, you make assumptions about my experience. Yet you know me not. I spent about 3 or 4 years doing Internet Marketing. I think I know a thing or two about what will grab attention and what won't. About what clicks will actually lead to sales and what will just be curiosity seekers that will eat up your click-thrus and not buy anything.
Many advetisers get it all wrong -- they spend enormous efforts at generating click-thrus but not refining their techniques so that they only get the clicks that lead to purchases. Their money to waste, and I am more than happy to take their money when they advertise on my sites.
On the other hand, myself personally will ignore most ads and wish that the advetiser could actually figure out what I'd really be interested in, because I would love to see the very thing that I "just gotta have no matter what."
What we really need is better targeting technology. The current stuff all depends on word matches that becomes rather elusive. Semantic matches that can match the actual content (not the words in the content) to a product or service that the content consumer would actually want to buy would be sweeter than sweet, and would cut down on much of the annoyance.
There are other approaches that I can think of or know, but I am not going to write a book in this post.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
With an enthusiast site like that, you might be able to ask for donations if you give a good explanation.
On the other hand, they may be valuable eyeballs; extremely targeted market who may actually be able and willing to spend :-)
You never know - depends on how you market those eyeballs.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Around here publicly funded television is not allowed to show ads. Also, ad delivery is always passive. It's the site i'm interacting with and if ads stop me from interacting it, im gonna "switch channels" or kill the ads. With former removed, the value that I could give by interaction alone is also lost. So... the owners choice.
I have a friend who is an actress on one of the bit movies they show. I am proud of her, and the show is cute. However, as much as I want to support her, escapists idiocy is unforgivable an I won't be a part of it. And when I talk to her next i will tell her. Ads are revenue and everyone deserves to be paid. However, banning someone because they discuss a problem with a ad causing issues with their system is foolhardly at best I have never visited their forums and will never go to the site again. It disappoints me because I will have to get to send me the end now. After for mister stfu/ I don't ddon't use adblock because I happen to like ads. They amuse me. But I won't people force them on me.
You don't.
It's pair.com's "Advanced" plan. Bandwidth isn't an issue. Disk space usage is growing, though. I'm about two-thirds of the way to the limit for the plan. Their overage costs are reasonable, and I'll be able to handle a reasonable overage without a problem, but at some point it'll be more than I'm willing to spend on it.
But as others said, getting donations are probably not a problem with this group. I didn't mean to say they would be - people have already sent some even without my request. I was thinking in a more general sense; I've seen site owners run into problems.
I wish I could afford to run it on vBulletin, though. PHP-Nuke is a PITA.
I've already forgotten who/etc ....
Site that doesn't want customers?
Site that thinks time-waste-removal tools are "Verboten" for the customer-sheeple?
Two identical sets? Thought so.
There are people who don't AdBlock? Why not??
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Just to point something out that many people tend to take for granted. I have ran some large file repositories in the past - related to (legal) distribution of Amiga software, demos (every single piece of software had been ensured for licensing for redistribution) that wasn't generally available elsewhere. Ad impressions themselves made a difference in keeping the site running, as it required constant upgrades for the growing traffic and I did end up blocking people who blocked ads, as the ones who did generally block impressions tended to download a very large amount of files costing me more in bandwith bills. I never required people click the ads, only load them to support the site. I had also offered a donation system, which would let them disable the ads in exchange.
After a while, a grease monkey script came out that essentially worked around the 'problem' and all 3TB of data was lost because said script spread very quickly among some heavy downloaders where the colo provider took the server as 'pay' since I couldn't afford it.
So far, I have not seen any other site providing the amount of software I had readily available and being that I still occasionally dabble in the Amiga community, I see many people not finding specific titles that were on the system.
I honestly don't see these "million others out there that provide it too".
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Sorry, but STFU! - When the only ads that pay the bills are ads that significantly reduce the usability of the site or the browser in general, it's time to change business model! - It's as simple as that!
Many sites have done this simple setup: Subscribers/members can pay for an ad-free experience (fairly low fee, labeled as 'support your site') or get the usual ad-infested but free ride. Now you can ban talking about ad-busting as there is an alternative... Now everybody is happy!
(I'm a long time ad-buster addon user, first Proxomatron, then AdBlock Plus - hate ads!)
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
In my scenario, because I was not able to block these freeloaders, the website in question died due to the increase in bandwith bills from leechers. If they never accessed content to begin with if they were not accessing ads, the website in question would have never died. I could have afforded to keep the website running for just 10 users who were not viewing ads, but not for over a hundred doing mass leeching, where each single one was intentionally blocking ads via grease monkey scripts.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's a shame software isn't more simple, where by webhosts could tick a box saying "block people who block ads" while people could click "block websites that use ads", but unfortunately that was never built into the HTTP spec.
I mean, it's a perfect win-win situation if it were. Webhosts don't pay for visitors using up resources and visitors don't have to deal with a website that has ads if they don't want and leeches don't exist.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.