Why just “Democrats Suck”? Why not “Bush is an idiot” or any variation? If you’re going to censor, go all out man!
Geez, if that’s offensive I can’t imagine your reaction to any Pit thread. I mean, if you want to see quality humaneness and non-offensive words, that may be your best bet. 
I don’t think the Reader wants you to do that, as that amounts to click fraud and could get them kicked out of the Google advertising program.
Are there any “Bush is an idiot!” ads? If yes, they should go too.
On a positive note, as if by magic, my hosts file has started working after two months of not working: I no longer see the ads!
So, carry on… nothing to see here…
In any case, my point stands about newcomers to this site that may be turned off by low-brow ads like “Democrats Suck! They eat babies!” or “Republicans are Evil!”
Or maybe Polerius, newcomers to this site might not be newcomers to Google Ads, which don a massive number of places on the Web.
What!? You say there’s a world apart? Oh, my! I’m going to have to sit down, I’m getting the vapors.
The comparison would only be valid if the SDMB approved each individual ad that shows up in the Google Ads. Which it does not.
Here’s a previous thread from less than a month ago, making exactly the same complaint as the OP. I think the issue was pretty thoroughly discussed then.
People are complaining about the ads.
Selected Google Adsense ads can be blocked by placing the URLs in a competitive ad filter.
The folks at the SDMB will never do this, IMHO, because it’s a change from defaut settings. I believe SDMB policy is to have leave vBulletin as stock as possible, with features stripped rather than added. If new smilies are seldom added to vBulletin, think they’ll add offending URLs to the Adsense competitive ad filter?
[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
The comparison would only be valid if the SDMB approved each individual ad that shows up in the Google Ads. Which it does not.[/QOUTE]
So what if a magazine directly approves each ad?
The magazine gives consent for crappy ads to appear in its pages. Whether it approves each individual ad is irrelevant.
If ads for healing magnets and psychic hotlines appear in Scientific American, does it matter whether the magazine approved them individually?
I did say “approves,” not “approves of.” I don’t know the magazine biz, so correct me if I’m wrong, but if ads for healing magnets and psychic hotlines appeared in Scientific American, it would, necessarily, mean that the magazine approved them individually, in the sense that someone at the magazine took money from the advertisers, said, “Okay, we’ll publish this ad,” and arranged for it to run in the magazine.
By contrast, The Reader has no editorial control over what Google displays as ads.
What does it matter?
To you, the reader of Scientific American, it appears the same way. That is, next to a great article about quantum physics, you get an ad for Miss Cleo.
Do you, as the reader, care whether Scientific American said, “Okay, we’ll publish this ad,” or whether Scientific American just hired a third party to put whatever ads they want in Scientific American?
I realize they made that claim, but it’s absolutely untrue. Perhaps the admin who posted that doesn’t know any better, but whoever signed up for the Google AdSense program can VERY EASILY go in and disable any objectionable ad. It’s far easier to turn off an ad that it is to get ads to appear on all the pages in the first place, as the former just requires signing in and entering the ad URL in the blocklist, while the second at least requires some minimal tech skill. If the can manage to have ads displayed in the first place it is easy as pie to have an ad disabled.
The link the admin provided to report objectionable content to Google is all fine and good but only works for attempting to get the ad banned from ALL SITES EVERYWHERE and not the much, much straightforward action of turning them off for this one. Obviously there are some (rather smallminded) sites where a DEMOCRATS SUCK ad would be appropriate, so Google isn’t about to ban them everywhere.
Instead of trying to pass the buck to Google they should take the minimal effort required to deal with it themselves.
The view towards Google ads is much like the same for making hacks to the board; there’s not much inclination to fiddle with things much. We don’t put a lot of hacks on the system because they get wiped out with any board system upgrade; what’s the point?
To muck with the Google ads is much the same; if a company refuses ads or makes too big of a stink about things Google just throws them out of the program without compensation. Apparently Google doesn’t want to mess overmuch with things either.
I’m sorry you are seeing material you find objectionable. We are perhaps asking a lot to ask you to skip over that which you dislike. Please bear with us.
Actually, most hacks don’t get wiped out with system upgrades (or can be reinstalled fairly easily), and as the software here hasn’t been updated for almost two years I can’t imagine it’d be much of a problem anyway.
The Google Adsense program works just as Dan Norder describes it. There’s no fiddling or hacking, it’s merely logging into the the control panel and adding a line to the blocked sites list. It couldn’t be more simple.
Tubadiva is right about one thing though, the view of whoever is in charge here is the same for the Google Adsense program and the vBulletin software itself. Either they don’t know how it works and can’t be bothered to learn, or refuse to use it to even a fraction of its potential.
No. If that’s the case, why would Google offer the competitive ad filter feature, allowing webmasters to block objectionable ads? For my site, there’s about 20 URLs in the ad filter, and Google isn’t threatening to boot me out of Adsense.
The people behind the scenes of the SDMB remind me of the typical father and a thermostat; if a kid should just so much as nudge it up or down one degree, he believes the thermostat will break and the furnace will explode.
::: sigh ::: Here we go again.
Generalization: the people who have access and ability to fiddle have a to-do list that is longer than your arm. And the priorities are based on financial and business necessities; where the money is and where the business is. Minor fixes may take only a few moments, but it’s a few moments dealing with a small and somewhat trivial issue that may be of concern to a handful of people – and that’s moments taken away from dealing with important and time-consuming matters. And, it’s not like there’s only one such trivial matter, there’s dozens of 'em out there.
This comment comes up quite often, that y’all seem to think the computer gurus at the READER have plenty of free time to handle your “only takes a minute or two” complaints. I dunno what to say. I prioritize my to-do lists based on importance, not based on how quickly I can do it. That’s kind of the best business model for such things.
I take both into account which is a better albeit a slightly more complicated model.
In any event, CK I really do appreciate your honest and straightforward response. Even though it is one that we may not like, it is much better than guesswork. What is irritating is when we’re told that something can’t be done or that something is a difficult thing to do when that is clearly not the case and it’s a simple matter of priorities.
True, though not necesarily appropriate to the OP. It is remarkable how you can improve the apparent quality of a system to its users by giving minor quick alterations much higher priority than they seemingly deserve. The reason for this is simple enough.
Most users have some sort of feel for how difficult a change mi9ght be to implement. If they request a change that seems difficult to them, then they usually expect it to take some time, and also rarely care if it is delayed by a small percentage of that time. Also for a change that takes too long from the users point of view, they tend to find there own work arround solutions. On the other hand, getting minor changes done quickly lets the user know that development/maintenance is occuring and this makes them far more positively inclined towards the development/maintenance team. Even if the fix is stupidly pedantic, it can help a great deal with user confidence to fix it quickly, whilst having a multi-week development finnishing 1 day later has almost no effect on the users in most cases.
It becomes very profitable for a development/maintenance team to rush through any alterations/fixes that are prompted by user request and take less than an hour to complete. This can create far better good will from the user base than doing things strictly in the order of importance, and that in turn will often lead to the user base being more considerate of the maintenance group leading to better speed even in completing the long term more important fixes.
Simply put, if a user notices that an annoying pop up message, it may be of almost no importance, but fixing it in the 10 minutes required leads the user to know that maintenance is doing its work. Then when the new mass input upgrade arrives a day later than expected they understand that the maintenance/development team were working on it as hard as they could and it was just an unavoidable lateness.
If instead the simple change waits until after the upgrade, then the users will think that maintenance can’t even handle easy things, and will consider the upgrade being 23 hours late as further sign of maintenances incompitance.
It is remarkable how effective this sort of scheduling can be in improving the users view of the software, and how this improved relationship between maintenance and customer can improve overall productivity.
It seems to me that it is called a “competitive ad filter” because it is intended to be used to block sites that directly compete with you. I believe you are misusing the feature even if Google doesn’t know/care to bother you about it.
Though on quick reflection “Democrats Suck” is by coincidence a current events forum and could probably be validly blocked as a “competitor”. heh.
You don’t have to remind us where we fall on the priority list.
Nope, it’s intended to use however you wish. See here. No mention of only blocking competitor’s ads; that’s just an example.