Page 5 - The Bad Advert Thread

Got this one today, double ad on the PHP forum landing page.

-Dan

James, I'd like to hear your opinion of my suggestion. Maybe cutting costs is just as good as raising revenue? Or actually better considering you're trying to get us to click on javascript page-overlay popup type ads. I click the normal ones, not these, never these.

I'm getting big screen covering popups again, on every page. I'm not sure what the advert itself is since the content is blocked but I still see the background blacked out and an empty popup window with a close button.

jamespayne, I remember you mentioning more aggresive advertising on the weekends, is this what we can expect every weekend now?

Oh come on Tann-san, just because he's the one we see most often doesn't mean he's the one in charge of stuff. Apparently it's the ZDE marketing guys to blame for this.

And yeah, the screen you're seeing is the same InfusionSoft ad as everybody else, minus the actual ad itself.

FYI people who are upset: developershed.com has a contact form.

At the start he said that when we see these things we should bring them to his attention so he could notify the relevant people. More recently he did suggest this may be something they do every weekend i.e. a different ad campaign for the weekends. He also said that these full screen adverts should only appear for each of us rarely, not on every page which was due to a bug in the ad developers code.

Since he's subscribed to this thread I didn't see the point of mailing it over since he'd get the email notification that this thread had been updated.

I'm not really that fussed, it just means I have more time to do other things on the weekend since I won't be constantly moderating here as I have in the past.

Speaking of being fussed, things like this generally don't annoy me... However, when I find myself unable to browse a site (in this case on my Droid X) because the advertising gets in the way and won't go away after clicking the "Close" button repeatedly, that annoys me


Putting my bipolar opinions on the side, this whole thing has turned into such a fiasco that the only way out of it that I can see is completely removing interstitials for the near future.

[edit] The way I see it, either they go away and don't come back until some cool-down time has passed AND the system works as it should, or I write a GreaseMonkey script to remove it and anything resembling it. That's not some kind of juvenile threat: that's an example of how, right now, they're doing more harm than good.

Hey,

For some reason I didn't get notification on this thread. The InfusionSoft ad is set to run the weekends for the rest of the month, but to my understanding once you see it the one time you should never see it again. I saw it when I came here today though, so I wonder if the cookie doesn't get reset when the ads gets put in again? Is anyone seeing it more than once?

I do not think there is another interstitial ad planned after this month, but that can all change of course. As for cutting costs versus raising revenue, it is definitely something we are looking at. In fact, I believe there are talks about a redesign and upgrade of the systems here, among a few other things I can't mention at the moment - all for the betterment (is that a word?) of all of the sites.

I'll let you know as soon as I know for sure. You should also notice some changes to the categories and whatnot over the next two weeks. I've been busy working with Eric to fix up the Tutorialized forums, which have come along nicely, so my next focus will be here, then SEO Chat, and so forth.

Thanks again, and sorry for any ad issues. Let me know if you do see it more than once and I will call tech about it.

-James

Looks like I won't be coming around on weekends anymore.

What kind of code review process are you guys subject to?

The rest of us would copy-paste the relevant css into a css file, save it, write one line onto the header file where the css used to be, press save, done. Two minutes tops would pay for itself rather quickly.



It must be terrible if your efforts are so hampered by outside forces that you can't do a ninja fix like that.

While you're on the subject of upgrading the system, maybe a bit more css and a bit less html would be good... you know, probably cut bandwidth usage from just pure html output (not counting images etc) by 5% or more.

James, I never visit DS from this computer (at work) on the weekends. I got the ad this morning, which means the run-time is probably "reset every weekend" rather than "only on the weekends."

-Dan

Lads/Lassies,

just because you can, does not make it right....

It's for an air freshener as well, we might not be considered the target audience for the numbnuts who thought it a good idea, so please advise them their money could be better spent elsewhere.

I say this in the spirit of one who has spent a considerable amount of time here, let's just say it doesn't help in any way, shape or form, and has driven a number of regulars away in past months, including at least one moderator that I've heard of.

Generally a faux pas such as this is because an ad serving company 'slips one in' ... at least on past occasions its been explained as such ... Were it me, I'd look at the symbiotic relationship between an adserving website and such adserving companies, they need to get a number of targetted spots out, that's gonna be hard without a good working relationship with ad serving websites, wouldn't it ...

Also I'm wondering if such ads comply with certain European legislation ... @ €3,000 per instance, they specifically mention email, but I might be inclined to lobby my MEP to have this included in further drafts if this continues

NO!!!, NO!!! MAKE IT STOP .....NOW

Audio ads on a development website, WHY, WHY, WHY ...

I say again, devshed is the site that prompted me to install flashblock, and that's absolutely shameful.

How about, instead of running 12 shady ads for terrible ebooks and dating sites, we run half as many ads, but make them for something worthwhile. Look at the daily wtf, they run ads for Microsoft, Rackspace, and SoftLayer. Who do we run ads for? "9 proven techniques to double your sales", "'free' IT whitepapers," and THREE camtasia ads? Someone is doing it wrong.

-Dan

There some adds appearing on the bottom of the pages that are quite annoying, they appear to be from adotube.com. They are flash video adds which auto-play on load with sound. There's also no controls to stop either the sound or the video.

They appear on just about every page load for me, which is quite annoying. Needless to say I was quite surprised when I opened up the site today during lunch at a local cafe to suddenly find my laptop going crazy with sound. Took a minute to locate them as I'd already tabbed out to something else while waiting for the page to load.

I have sound muted so I never noticed. But speaking of music you now have a rep power of 2112!!!!!