Ad Complaints

[Howie]

yeah I could understand if that bottom-of-the-page ad was here only every so often, but it is literally every page! There must be something that Rob can do to remove ads from that location. The "close" doesn't work when I'm on my MacBook Pro (use most of the time) for some reason.

 

[Redflea]

Dang...may have to fall back to Firefox. Really like Chrome's simplicity.

Thanks for the adblock plus suggestion.

 

[joneee]

ahhh no firefox at work!! err...

 

[Branndon]

i find that firefox with no ads is faster than chrome with ads. usually ads seem to be the primary culprit of slowness.

In my case, I'll leave my browser open for days with 10-20 tabs, and in firefox that kills the computer. In chrome, each tab is it's own process, so I can just kill the one that's taking up the memory. Also it seems even with no ads, firefox is just a little slower on mine.

 

[Aerimus]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/

search for "ad-block plus" and install. restart firefox and click the subscribe button in the window that pops up when you restart. Subscribing will get you a maintained list of sites to block or you can not subscribe and build your own list.

Ads are what drive sites like this. It's totally unethical in my eyes to block them, however, there is reason to the amount of advertising that is acceptable. The droid ad that is popping up would be acceptable if it popped up on the screen when you visit the site, however, it's a bit much that it pops up every time you navigate to a new page, or open a new tab.

 

[stoggy]

How could it possibly be unethical to not download something that I don't want? I don't like liver, but grocery stores depend on selling, so am I being unethical by not buying liver?

If the ads weren't so invasive and so annoying ad-block wouldn't have been written or wouldn't be so popular. Maybe the ad makers should look at what they are doing and not expect users to find away to stop them. Welcome to open source. Obviously someone didn't like the way the did it and did it their own way.

I hate the little mouse over pop-ups.

 

[Aerimus]

How could it possibly be unethical to not download something that I don't want? I don't like liver, but grocery stores depend on selling, so am I being unethical by not buying liver?

If the ads weren't so invasive and so annoying ad-block wouldn't have been written or wouldn't be so popular. Maybe the ad makers should look at what they are doing and not expect users to find away to stop them. Welcome to open source. Obviously someone didn't like the way the did it and did it their own way.

I hate the little mouse over pop-ups.

The product is this forum. You clearly enjoy it because you are here and have posted 27 times to this point. It gets paid for by the ads. I'm not trying to be snarky, so please don't take it that way. It's not cheap to host these things or spend the time on them that moderators and news posters spend. Their time and operating expenses have to be paid for somehow. By blocking the ads, you essentially are walking into a store and taking a product off the shelf without paying for it, because the form of payment is your face time in front of the ads.

edit: Don't get me wrong, some are excessive. If I find that they get too excessive on a site, I simply won't return to that site. That is my choice as a consumer.

 

[stoggy]

That is a very narrow minded view. If we all just went along nothing would ever change. iphone wouldn't exist and neither would android. All there would be is microshaft.

Any forum is only as good as the people that come and participate in it, which is the only reason the advertisers come. Unless you are trying to say you only come to watch the ads? So if you let a couple ads chase you away, which sounds pretty stupid if your coming to watch ads, from a forum then you have allowed the forum to make itself worse. Unless you are saying that your opinion is worthless and you leaving the forum will somehow make it better?

Anything worth defending can defend itself, it just needs help sometimes.

I am very "snarky" deal with it. I have never heard of "snarky" before but I think I like it.

 

[borderless]

This ridiculous banner on the bottom of the screen is driving me nuts. How ridiculous and insulting. What other forums do you visit that are comparable to androidforums?

 

[trick202]

What banner?

 

[TheErMinE]

lol.. I didn't even know there was a banner.. Firefox+AdBlockPlus will take care of most of that crap, yea, if I had to stare at that while cruising the forums I'da moved on too.

 

[fireshaper]

The banner at the top doesn't bug me as much as when it pops up the banner at the bottom as well and you have to click the "Close [X]" link to get rid of it.

 

[tsaunders]

Really wish Chrome would block that banner at the bottom.

 

[Charlie.Masone]

Isn't it annoying enough to visit just one?

 

[mswhite60]

Huh. Another reason to love Firefox. Did not know there is an annoying banner here!

 

[Aerimus]

I'm finding this conversation fun, so don't think I'm just being a dick. This is a fine line that we all walk, and believe me, there are times when i'm on the other side.

Example: I watch almost all my television online. I'm more than happy to watch the advertising on hulu in order to watch my shows. However, if i'm trying to catch up on older seasons of a show, I'm not going to go out and spend $40 on a complete season of a show. I'm going to download it from a bit torrent. The difference here is that I have no other alternative for watching that show online. You can see that this is a very hazy area for me as well, so don't feel like i'm trying to be the internet police. I'm just willing to play within the rules as long as their is a viable option for me to do that in the format that I want. This also causes change because executives realize they can make more money through advertising on a site like hulu than if they don't offer season one of a show online.

It's important to not separate the product and the advertisement. The advertisements you see are the payment for the product which is the forum. You are talking about "change" but what you are missing is that you are preventing change in what you are doing. When you block an ad, the moderators don't know that(to my knowledge there's no way of tracking this, feel free to correct me if i'm wrong). The way change happens for a forum is that people start visiting a different forum instead because the advertising is less obtrusive. This causes the "site visits" to this forum to go down and makes the moderators say "uhoh, we may have a problem" to which they will try to find a solution.

That solution would be to make less in your face advertising on their site. Thus, change happened.

 

[trick202]

I'm on Chrome and I don't see it.

With all the info and advice available on here for free, I don't object to any advertising away from the actual threads.

Don't underestimate what it take to keep places like this up and running.

 

[Wakey]

I don't particularly like having to kill a banner that blocks part of the screen.

What's worse is about 10% of the time the damn thing opens when you try to kill it.

Between this and the problem when viewing from the droid itself, this forum is going to run off it's members.

 

[gsontag]

HAHA wow to answer the question i visit here, only the forum and not phandroid and then androidcentral for both news and the forum.

 

[Les Common]

Today, not only does the "See Droid in Action" banner pop up every refresh, but it will not

a) close, or
b) send me to the droid in action ad.

It just sits there, blocking my view and making "read it all by pagedown" impossible.

This is observed in Chrome, part of Google's plan to take over the known world.

I really like Chrome, and prefer to use it as my browser.

Opera, on the other hand, gives a usable browsing experience at this site.

Kinda sucks that an ad for Google's collaboration w/ Verizon and Moto is showing off a problem with the otherwise wonderful Google browser.

And really sucks that I had to go manually scroll to complete this post, since the cursor disappeared under the increasingly counterproductive and infuriating ad.

I know there's $$$ involved here. I know the business model for websites like this depends on ads.

And I also know that if Howard or BoyGenius or somebody else gets critical user mass, I'll end up there to avoid the droidad.

... off to check out Android Overdrive...

Les

 

[BucYouUp68]

Motorola Droid Forum

 

[Phases]

Just to chime in on this.

- I've seen this thread (merged a couple to this) and the other in the Droid area. I have been - as much as he loves it I'm sure - linking them regularly to Rob over the past couple weeks. I've been trying my damn-dest to help him work something out about it. We do want our members to be happy, but it's really not as simple as all that.

- Yes, the amazon ad sucks, it pisses me off too (Other Mobile site changes have occurred though, if those happen to be what you mean instead). It is getting removed, today.

- The Droid ad sucks too. However in this case we are under contract - and have to live with it. Verizon has worked closely with our ad network to produce that. No, We don't like it. No, we can't remove it. Switching ad networks (when not bound by a contract) is a pain as it is. It cost money, it cost couple days of testing, and it costs some gray hairs. However it would be considered if this were the sorta service we were getting when not under contract. When it expires they can expect us to move on if we continue to get obtrusive ads.

- Oh and also.. Yes, it cost a lot a month to keep this forum up - and those ads are what do it.

I will link Rob to this a final time (and link here from the Droid thread) in case he wants to chime in. Before too long though, the ads will be swapped out by the network anyway.

 

[Phases]

Hey all,

Please see my reply on the newly merged "Ad Complaints" thread in the Suggestions and Feedback forum in regards to this.

Sorry for the trouble guys.

 

[Alcaron]

Soon as the first person said "ad network" and "under contract" I was fine. Oh don't get me wrong, screw Verizon and the ad network, but what can you guys do? And we DO use this site for free so...I don't see a lot of room to keep complaining about anything other than VZW being stupid.

 

[Wakey]

Hey all,

Please see my reply on the newly merged "Ad Complaints" thread in the Suggestions and Feedback forum in regards to this.

Sorry for the trouble guys.

Thanks!