See it? It’s in the lower part of the “A” in “Straight.” It’s kind of pi-shaped.
Any plans to fix it? Obviously not a huge priority, but it might be nice if it got fixed. It’s a tad distracting!
Huh? I didn’t see anything at 300%. Anybody else see it?
That small artifact on the letter “A” is called a fnord.
Does one need special glasses or something to see fnords? I can’t see anything unusual at all.
There’s no artifact. To prove it, right-click on the image, copy, and then drop it into Paint. Flood the letter with a contrasting color like red, and you’ll see it all fills. No artifact.
Does it stay in position when you slide the window up? I have an artifact in my monitor that I see. They say every flat screen has several tiny ones.
Does it look like the tail of an Invisible Pink Unicorn ?
This is why you turn away from the monitor when you sneeze 
It doesn’t matter if I slide the window up or down, the artifact is still in the letter. It haunts me in my dreams. It tells me to do things … HORRIBLE things!
There’s definitely something there. I dropped the image into Photoshop and it is still there. When I blew the image up to 800 percent, I also noticed a thin orange artifact in the “H” of “Straight” that I hadn’t noticed before, along with a thin strip of orange on the “R” and an orange smudge at the bottom of the “S.”
THE ARTIFACTS ARE EVERYWHERE!!!
So why am I the only one who can see them? Is it because I’m wearing my special “They Live” glasses?
Snooooopy, do you also see canals on Mars?
Just wondering…
I’ve blown it up to 1600%, and all I see is a little goober hiding under the P of “DOPE” but I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a (R) symbol.
As **drewbert ** said, turn your head when you sneeze next time. 
Also snooooop, don’t touch the screen when your fingers are cheeto-fied.
You FOOLS! When the artifacts attack, don’t say I didn’t warn you! They’re THERE, and they’re WAITING!
I should clarify that the artifacts are not present in the enormous banner on the main Straight Dope page, but when you enter the message boards, the artifacts are there in the smaller banner.
Even as I type this, I can see them … laughing at me because I can’t convince anyone else of their existence. I feel like Cassandra of ancient Greek legend, but without tits.
I don’t think anyone will believe you until you show us a screen dump … and claim your $1,000,000 from James Randi.
I just checked, and there’s nothing. I blew it up with photoshop, used a 0 tolerance (only the EXACT SAME Color) test on the A, and it all showed up as the same color except of course for the edges, which are anti-aliased.
Why can’t you see them? There are artifacts all over the banner! In EVERY letter! And they change shape. And wriggle up and down and around. And leap from letter to letter, twining with each other.
Oh… oh, they’re beginning to pulse with a tiny flickering light. Now they’re oozing out of the letters to the clear space below. They’re forming a seething, roiling line…
AH! The line is breaking into clumps! The clumps are consolidating into shapes… shapes of letters… turning red, to umber, now deepening to black even as a word begins to emerge…
Illuminati
AAAAAAAIIIIEEEEEE!!!
I must alert the world! I must spread the word before
Now look here, people – when my alien masters wish me to carry out another step in their mission to colonize the planet and enslave humanity, they just send me an e-mail using standard written English. They don’t hide meaningless-looking artifacts inside Web pages.
It’s obviously not THEM. But who could it be? And why?
If anybody would like to take a look at the bitmap image that I downloaded with the artifacts intact, let me know. My alien masters would certainly like me to put this behind me so I can start focusing on work again free of distraction.
Don’t worry Snooooopy, the men in white coat are on their way. They’ll make everything better.
Before the men in white coats turn up though, how was your May 1st?
I apologize for the boringness and non-silliness of this response, but:
Do you use some kind of dial-up accelerator like AOL’s topspeed thing, or AT&T accelerator? It could be compressing your images and adding the artifacts.
Or, you know, aliens.
Snooooopy, I had that trouble too, but then I started hanging aluminum foil strips from my glasses, in addition to the hat-lining, and the artifacts went away.