Okay, first the popunder ads screwed up my browser history so the back button wouldn’t work correctly. Now video ads are autoplaying.
Are you just trying to annoy us into paying?
I suspect but don’t know that it’s ad-related, but some script is just killing my browser (Firefox). Everything slows to a crawl, then a message pops up telling me a script is nonresponsive or something to that effect, so I say “Cancel script” and the message immediately pops up again, and then the whole browser freezes until I shut down Firefox with Windows Task Master. Has been making visiting this site a whole lot less fun.
If so, they’re doing a very bad job of it. “Pay up and I’ll keep on twisting your arm anyway” isn’t a very effective pitch.
And yes, I just got another one.
Reading the dope at a computer at work with no adblock. The ads are causing Flashplayer to run up huge resources then crash on every page. Is SD going to blame that on Flash or the ads?
Yes, but there were moderators who were elevated to administrators for this purpose.
Though I don’t agree with Frank. That change happened because the site got hacked by someone who hijacked an Administrator account. So the solution was to reduce the number of Administrator accounts. That’s actually good security. Keep the intrusion points as low as possible.
Plus, according to a fairly popular forum I was once a part of, changing names on vBulletin is really taxing on the database if done correctly. So having some friction in the system is probably a good idea.
Though I do think the database is probably too big for its own good, and that it would be good to archive a lot of it somewhere and relaunch with a much more lean database going back only a short ways.
I visit here from several different computers. Using a fairly old computer today (AMD3500) I was completely unable to get in with FF. It started to show the page, got down to the adds, went blank and stuck on downloading some
I don’t think that the issue is paying to get rid of ads that has me bothered, it’s that ads are filled with malware (I’ve been hit three times), crash your computer and are chock full of tracking scripts. And now I can pay to get rid of those sorts of ads? It’s like Ed is coming over to my house asking for me to buy a subscription “cuz you uh … <knocks my wife’s antique vase to the floor> don’t want nuttin’ bad to happen.”
OK, but are you SURE the ads are full of malware? Are you sure your computer isn’t just running provocative software?
I just got a particularly odious ad, even though I’ve been logged in for at least a month.
I know you guys don’t have much control over the content, but this was some particularly odious piece of right-wing glurge trying to tell me about how Hillary was stealing my money for her campaign every time I purchased or used some common product. The only saving grace was that I couldn’t have found out what the product was even if I had wanted to - the ad was broken -it was so large I could only view half of it on my screen, the window had no scroll bar and the minimize window was disabled. Not sure if that was a bug or feature.
I usually stay logged in, do I need to log out and back in on a regular basis to block the ads?
This thread is amusing the hell out of me for some reason.
I have an iPhone and an iPad running Safari. I have a Windows PC at home and at work running Chrome with AdBlock on. I never log out. I have never seen an ad. Maybe it’s because of my Charter Membership. Just putting this here to add to the data.
Yes, members don’t see ads. Try logging out and you’ll see that the SDMB looks like a 6th tier site from 2003 with all of the obnoxious, intrusive ads. I have no doubt it’s dissuading people from coming here. I probably would’ve never stayed here myself if that was my first impression.
No, not your charter membership. Mine lapsed and I’m just a guest now but logged in and with an adblocker running I have yet to see an ad on the board. (PC with Firefox and Adblock Plus.)
Mine lapsed as well because I changed my profiles email address to one intended for use here only and then forgot about. Come spring I began to wonder when my subscription was up so I could pay next year’s fee and looked into it, only to discover that I’d overshot the deadline by five days or so. I sent a PM to Jerry, who wrote the reminder message about fee renewal coming up, explaining what I’d done and why, and asking that I be allowed to pay the fee and retain my Charter Membership. I heard not a word in response, so, no more money from me.
I’d have happily paid for membership here just to support the board, freedom from ads notwithstanding, had I been allowed to retain my Charter Membership. And I have no problem with ads when I’m on my desktop, but during the many hours a day I’m away from home they’re a pain in the butt. On my phone I have to navigate to Settings>Safari>Advanced>JavaScript and turn JavaScript off in order to stop the ads and read the board. But this renders most of the other sites I go to inoperable or only semi-operable. For example, I can’t check my bank accounts or open certain news articles or operate Facebook in its normal configuration with JavaScript disabled.
So the result is that I’m on the board a lot less during my time away from my desktop. Now maybe that doesn’t matter to TPTB, but I would think driving traffic away would be counter-productive to the reason for running advertising.
I feel for Ed. Managing this board has got to be a real pain and he probably has little say in the matter, but this latest round of advertising appears to have been a huge mistake.
Having terrible trouble on both Firefox and Chrome. Fine on the ipad.
This. I don’t mind ads. I don’t mind asking for subscriptions. I mind the ads that this site serves. Well, mostly i use an ad blocker or Tapatalk, so mostly i don’t see them. But on my office computer they are lurid and untempting and annoying.
I can’t say that I’ve noticed any malware. But i think the site would do itself a favor if it could upgrade to a higher quality ad vendor.
What I’m getting from this whole thread is that this new ad series, far beyond doing the annoying thing that Ed Zotti warned us about in his OP (which everybody immediately recognized as being annoying enough), but further, it seems that the board is working with a new ad server that is doing a whole lot of much worse obnoxious shit than that – either their web programming needs some serious debugging work, or this new ad server is a seriously disreputable one that is happy to serve up some nasty ad-mal-ware.
Our Ad Department is usually so much more reliable.
Since the new ad campaign began, I only got the one pop-under window when I access the message boards from the SD Home Page. That was just what Ed said would happen. Never got additional ads. Always logged in.
This morning I accessed the message board from the home page and got a popover ad.
Windows 7, IE11.
I did not see this until after I had already posted in the sticky about ads being resumed.
I am getting some kind of sound that tries to play when ads are running. Frequently I get a message at the top of the page in a thin yellow banner that shockwave has crashed and I don’t even have shockwave?! I have had this computer (windows 10) for a couple months and used without incident until this week. Now the ads are causing the page to freeze and jerk around. Whatever issue is causing this is also creating difficulty replying to messages. It appears to be ad related as the jerky sound stops immediately when I close this site. It has become difficult to read and use.
I really can’t use this site comfortably anymore and this is on a desktop. It is a shame as I was really starting to like it.
And of course as usual with these ad or malware threads, you’ll notice the huge number of posts from the board ops acknowledging and addressing the problems we’ve been writing about.