What thread?
F5 equals refresh on most desktop computers.
I’m one who doesn’t see them. Please explain further what you see that I don’t.
Dammit I knew someone would ask that and I’m a bit short of time today. Found it:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=9209150&postcount=4
Folks, we’ve had banner ads on this board forever.
It’s just that now they’re underneath the Straight Dope masthead instead of on top of it, and it looks like some more expensive production work. They don’t really bug me any more now than they did before.
Face it, the SDMB was a labor of love on the part of the Reader, and the Reader is just the North Midwest branch of Creative Loafing now. CL are going to try a few things to make this place turn a profit for once, but if and when that doesn’t work (depends on whether or not they discover and fix the technical administration problems that turn the board into a sluggish pain and a money pit), the SDMB will be no more.
I’m sorry to see that the ads are so anathema to so many that they are planning on leaving. Makes me think I’ve made the right decision in not re-upping when my account expires this weekend. It’s not the ads, though, it’s real life ramping up and letting me know it needs me to give up this mental crutch.
You must all learn to play bass, and then join the TalkBass forum. Preferably upright bass, since the bass guitar forums have more obnoxious kids and bad spellers.
Too bad to see you go, though. Please do stop by and say hi every once in a while.
Is this a whoosh? How can he stop by and say hi when he doesn’t have posting privileges? 
I have to agree with the o.p. The banner ads at the bottom were not worth the venom flung at them and even provided some degree of levity at times, but these flashing, screaming, noise-making ads below the header are as intolerable as Courtney Love at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and if they don’t cease forthwith I’m inclined to place my energies and interests in some less obnoxious forum, or at least one that doesn’t follow its mantra of “Fighting ignorance since 1973” with adverts for Lyndon LaRouche and “Top Supermodel Searches”.
Stranger
There’s also Una Persson’s board: UnaBoard
Ehhhhhhhhhh!
You guys should really do something more productive than bitch about some ads. Go answer a question in the GQ or something.
There does seem to be a lot of people here desperately wanting to be outraged, and also lacking basic internet skills. Not only that, but lacking an interest to learn those skills, which seems to me to fly in the face of the site’s motto. Even after having been told one zillion times how to go about blocking the ads, they choose to rather keep seeing them and remain outraged.
I see no ads. No banners, no Google ads, no ads on the front page. Guess what, I also don’t see any ads on most other sites i visit. I’ll reiterate: Firefox, Adblock. Very simple.
ETA: Also, this method.
Ads on the internet are there for only one reason: to be blocked. Learn to just zap’em, gain peace of mind.
I’ve been blocking Google Ads here since day one and only saw the banners when I turned adblock off to see what the deal was. Doesn’t mean that this isn’t the wrong decision by whoever it is that made it, and that I can’t voice my opinion of that move.
Fact is, there is something very wrong here, in a couple different ways:
Way One is there being no discussion of anything ahead of time. Just flip a switch and hope people won’t notice, or if they do that they won’t complain too loudly. Way Two is that whoever made this decision apparently has a different view of the goal of this board than whoever didn’t make this decision from the beginning, and that goal was arrived at, again, without any sort of discussion or announcement or anything.
Again, just because this particular move doesn’t affect me directly doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect me at all: Guests and new users get to see that this place doesn’t operate like most others – and not in a good way, and enough paying members don’t seem to like it that they’re talking about being out the door when their subscriptions are up. That means it affects me, because it affects the quality of the people here. Even if everybody blocked the ads, it’s still a pretty good indication of the flippant consideration given us by whoever it is who made the decision, and a lot of people don’t like being treated without respect regardless of the actual affect it has on them.
I have no dog looking for bones in this discussion because the instructions **What exit ** gave in post #35 worked like a charm to get rid of the banner ads for this site. I’ll gladly buy him a beer or two 
Now back to some more constructive SDMB’ing.
Guess what – despite the fact that our tags say “member,” we are, in fact, customers here, not members. It’s not a democracy. Our only vote on operations here is “yay” or “nay” – either we pay to hang out here or we don’t.
Me – I vote “yay.” Block the freakin’ ads and grow the fuck up.
I don’t agree with this conclusion - customers should be able to make requests and demands of their vendor, not just put up and shut up, or leave. Sure, the vendor might decide not to entertain those requests and demands, at which point the customer still has the option of continuing to make requests and demands, in addition to put up and shut up, or leave.
Well, yes, there is that. Frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t been admonished for discussing blocking tactics - I thought that was verboten.
This thread has cursed me. On the first page I looked all over to see the banner ad being discussed and there was none. Nothing at the top, only Google at the bottom. As soon as I clicked over to the second page, there it was.
Meh, I’ve seen worse.
Ads are an increasing fact of life. The PTB calls the shots, we have little recourse. Our only two options, even in mass quantitys, are post here or not.
I’ll stick around until the Zedo and AdClick stuff starts showing up and gets me blocked at work.
That’s because TPTB have not noticed yet. If they had then this thread would get whooshed away to ATMB on a magic carpet ride.
well, no one here has posted how to get rid of these animated ads in Safari on a Macbook. I was one of those who protested the banner ads that appear down below and experience proved me wrong. This new type of ad is not the same–they move, they make noise, they are intrusive and annoying.
Note to University of Phoenix: I will never attend there. I will make sure that no one I love attends there. This sentiment goes for all the ads–I don’t need some company to check my credit rating for me etc.
Until I can figure out how to block them in Safari, I am stuck with scrolling my screen upwards so that I just don’t plain don’t see them. This is also annoying. My membership is due up in December and I had every intention of re-upping. Now, I am not so sure. I don’t think it’s a dump or that the people in charge are evil or mean or however we’re demonizing them at present. I think they seriously misread their audience and population here.
Where will we go? I don’t hopefully know.
I was part of a chat/board community on the old Freeserve UK site - the owners changed the software to something really horrible and the whole community (not a large one, admittedly) took the decision to uproot and move to MSN.
(Later, Freeserve got bought out by Wanadoo, who got bought out by Orange, and what was left of the original community vanished anyway).
The MSN version of the community still exists and still has a few of the original members, but it pretty much tore itself to pieces under the strain of in-house moderation. The little silly grudges and alliances that had always existed turned into bitter factions and cliques and within six or eight months, nothing much was left.
There were a lot of ways that place was different from the SDMB, but I can’t imagine any wholesale move elsewhere would be any more successful. It will be different to the SDMB, and those differences, whatever they are, will be a big deal.