That’s the Tapatalk pop-up that seems to be common to any site using vBulletin. That is basically just trying to sell people on the evil Tapatalk (have I mentioned that I hate Tapatalk?).
The issue I, and apparently others here are having, is a redirect away from the browser program completely and to what is essentially a paid advertisement to get us to “see” some damn Application.
It’s kinda like in the old days when a tv commercial would come on and be like 20 times the volume level of the program you were watching. Only here, a wet phone book is also ejected from the tv screen to smack you in the face, then fall into your lap open to a page advertising a taxi service.
I don’t know about you, but I can only be hit in the face by a phone book that smells of wet hobo shoes so many times before I turn the tv off for good.
And did I mention that I hate Tapatalk? (Which is really a separate issue altogether.)
We had a whole thread on the redirect issues in ATMB about a month ago and clearly TPTB don’t give a shit. I downloaded a different browser called Mercury that has completely solved the problem.
Safari is shit, a rogue advertiser’s dream, or for that matter any advertiser’s dream, whether it’s running on Mac OS or iOS. It lacks tons of controls other browsers include as a matter of course.
It must have taken years of non-stop work by thousands of Apple coders to make it so utterly brain dead. I use iCab Mobile. It runs Adblock Plus filters and can spoof itself as a desktop machine that instantly stops the Tapatalk flak that’s little different from a virus. I don’t doubt any other browser does, too.
Likely, the Tapatalk mob’s war on users can be stopped by turning off JavaScript in Settings/Safari. But then everything else that depends on JavaScript stops, too.
The Chicago Sun-Times, which owns the Straight Dope, isn’t an innocent in this, either. It’s the Sun-Times that won’t change the Tapatalk-ad coding on this site.
I have no idea if they don’t give a shit, are merely mildly constipated, or just simply cannot figure out why some fraction of mobile users have this happen while others do not.
Funny, I have no problem with spoilers in Safari. I can make spoilers and view them just fine. I use an older version, though. I understand some sites are “broken” on newer versions of Safari.
Every once in a blue moon I get a Tapatalk prompt, which I decline. Otherwise it loads fine for me. I genuinely have no idea what you’re talking about.
If that is directed at the OP, then me explain better:
On my iPhone, I open the SDMB on Safari (all current Apple updates installed).
I pick on a thread, like this one and instead of the thread opening, Safari redirects me (screen goes white, I can see the address bar going to one ad site and another). Eventually the Apple Application Store App opens to an App page, basically implying I should try this App. I can never get to the SDMB thread I want. This ONLY happens at this site.
This only happens on iPhone. I’m writing this now on my laptop.
As to the Tapatalk prompt, I get that if cookies have been erased. After the initial prompt it goes away for good.
As of right now, this site is not accessible on my iPhone due to the redirect.
I initially started this thread in IMHO, with the idea of asking if things like this were driving away users. IMO this place is less populated than before. It’d be a shame for it to become some dark corner of the internet.
There are two issues being discussed here, and both are known issues.
The first is that this site (the SDMB) has a pop-up if there is an app available for browsing here. So if you have an iPhone, android, blackberry, etc. you’ll get a pop-up telling you that tapatalk is available. There’s something available for Chrome too if I recall correctly, some sort of extension I believe. I’m going from memory here. I can check the actual script that runs if anyone is really curious.
If you have any of the above, you’ll get a pop-up that lets you know that tapatalk or whatever is available. Then you won’t see the pop-up again, although I think after a certain amount of time it’s set to show the pop-up again, so once every 90 days or something like that.
The pop-up uses a cookie to tell if it’s displayed the pop-up for you or not, so if you’ve got a cookie problem, sometimes you can have the pop-up show up every single time you load a page. The usual fix for this is to clear your cookies, clear your cache, make sure your cookies are enabled, make sure you don’t have something that comes along and clears out your cookies, etc.
That said, there seems to be a bug in iOS devices running Safari. Even with cookies set properly, users will sometimes see the pop-up over and over. One user here tried to set an exception to block the pop-up script, but did it wrong and blocked the entire SDMB. When they removed the exception, the pop-up no longer appeared. Since adding and deleting the exception shouldn’t have made any difference in this case, this seems to be a bug in iOS and/or Safari. No other devices (android, blackberry, etc) have shown this type of problem.
The second problem being discussed here is that certain users are being redirected away from this site due to advertising. Again, this seems to pick on Safari users, and sends them to the app store. This is a known issue that was supposed to get fixed. People are still reporting it though, and there are a couple of recent reports in the “SDMB ads are resuming - post problem reports here” sticky at the top of this forum. Feel free to add your own problem reports to that thread. Hopefully this will get fixed properly soon.
I can’t access Straight Dope on my phone, because it sends me to the app store, or sometimes to some game site that I don’t want to go to. This has only been going on ten days or so.
What’s strange is that I have no problems on my Ipad.
