NoScript is the most flexible and adaptable addon that I know of to stop such things…
It is true that, if you make the ads too annoying, people will just block them. Heck, the main reason I’m happy I got gifted a membership is that I don’t have to feel guilty about using an adblocker, and yet don’t have to see the ads.
I do not want to see the board go under, so let me stress this again:
annoying ads = blocked ads = no extra revenue.
Tuba, you are missing the point that it is easy for people to block ads. I thought the idea was for guest to see the ads instead of paying? Once the ads get annoying enough to pop-over and make noise, guests will either wander off or block the ads.
Can the board pick and choose which ads come up? Can they ask, for instance, that no sexually suggestive NSFW ads be used?
In other words, is it possible to fine-tune the sort of ads that are shown, eliminate the bells-and-whistles ones, reject those that would be unpopular here (anti-abortion organizations, etc) or are you pretty much in the hands of the people who supply the ads?
Not speaking in any official capacity here – I don’t book the ads and the staff has zero influence on that part of the business – but in these parlous times revenue is revenue and very much needed and I suspect most any advertiser short of porn sites who throws money in CL’s direction is going to get some action here. They’re just not going to turn down most advertising, they can’t afford to. I’ve seen ads run here that would have been rejected out of hand not long ago.
While the ads are not my favorite thing to look at here I don’t think I’ve seen any of them that are NSFW. But I don’t read the site in someone else’s office so perhaps I’m missing something here. What’s normally considered NSFW besides a good deal of the content that’s been running on the site since 1999? The Straight Dope has never been held out to be a “child-friendly” or family type of site and I don’t think it ever will be. The Straight Dope has been banned in some library systems and most of the armed forces internet for content, not for ads, just to name two. Over the years I’ve heard of several situations where the only people in some companies that can read the Dope at work are the IT guys. The Straight Dope site has always been troublesome to some organizations. (For example, I doubt we get a lot of traffic from, say, the Southern Baptist Convention. Just my guess there.)
Tuba: The SDMB proper is all-text and always has been. Ads, however, are graphical and audio and, by design, a lot more attention-grabbing than our posts here if you’re just wandering by. Thus, a post about, say, penis cancer is more likely to be work safe than an ad for Mexican fat-burners that features garish photos of women in bikinis.
This is obviously not going to apply to places where keyword blocking or domain-name filters are in effect. But that isn’t what we’re talking about anyway. We’re talking about what ‘NSFW’ usually relates to, which is the likelihood of someone walking into your cube and catching a glimpse of something obviously naughty.