On a few sites, I’ve had the frustrating experience where I was reading website content and this advert appeared on another layer, blocking what I was trying to read. It really does look like a “layer” thing – a floating box. (Of course, now that I need an example, I can’t find one.)
What is it and how do I close it?
Unlike pop-ups, there doesn’t seem any obvious way of making it go away. It’s on the same page as the content, just “floating” in front of it as if on a different layer. When you scroll down it adjusts itself so that it is always dead centre on the screen (looks like absoulte position values of a tabled element on a different layer), making the website content tough to read.
Is it DHTML or something? And how do you make it go away?
The last time I encountered this was a long time ago on the website for the Toronto Sun, it was blocking an article (and no, I don’t normally read that crappy paper).
But someone else asked me about it today and I had to admit that I didn’t know what kind of coding created it or how to make it go away.
I good browser (like, Opera, fer instance) will let you easily toggle support for plugins and javascript on and off. Leave 'em off except for pages that need them for actual content and you’ll never be hassled again.
No, the one I saw most definitley had no close button on any kind. Neither did the one my friend was complaining about. Hence the frustation – there was no way of closing the stupid thing.
Hm. I suppose it could have been Flash, but I don’t think I had a Flash plug in at the time (which kept a great number of ads from annoying me, so that was a good thing). I could be mistaken though in the time line. It was also on a newspaper’s site that doesn’t normally use Flash on their pages. The site is typically a straighforward HTML template. I don’t know about the site that my friend was visiting.
Layy Mudd That’s a good idea.
What I actually ended up doing was leaving the page because I couldn’t be bothered to try and work around it. But I was wondering what programming language did this and I was wondering if there was a solution that is as simple as Alt+F4 is for pop-ups.
I’ll take notes next time I encounter one. I haven’t seen it again on the newspaper’s site, presumably as a result of complaints.
I beleive I have seen these ads on MSN.com, when you click to read a news story. Sometimes there is an X to close it sometimes there isn’t. The ads do disappear after a while though.
You set your browser by default to not allow javascript or plugins or whatever to even display these ads in the first place. So you just never see them.
Then if there are specific websites you go to regularly that use javascript or whatever for part of their functioning, you add those website addresses to an ‘allowed list’, so they can do so.
The ‘pain’ only happens once, the first time that you go to a ‘good’ website that needs this to function properly. You have to add that address to your ‘allowed list’. But this is greatly offset by the ‘pain’ you avoid from all those junky ads that would otherwise pop-up or float over or pop-under or somehow interfere with what you wanted to see.