This topic was created by rhydian .
I don't mind El Reg carrying ads, and will happily click on one every now and again to keep Vulture Central in tea and biscuits. Thing is, over the last few days there's been an advert for a toshiba laptop that expands and shifts the page down in FF, which is muchos annoying. Any chance of removing it?
Diolch
Rhyds
I have to agree. I've no objection to adverts, I recognise that poor El Reg Hacktards have to eat, and therefore us commentards have to stare at ads.
However I do object to starting to read an article, and then having it suddenly scroll zoomingly past my eyes at supersonic speed, as some advert up top has decided to go walkabouts.
The ones that really piss me off, are the ones that come down like a curtain over everything you're reading, and force you to click on a close button. They were fashionable a while back, and should that ever come back, my patience will snap and I'll use an ad-blocker. Which I currently don't. At which point it'll probably be too much hassle to train it for which sites deserver to go un-blocked.
I've done a quick bit of research. I'm running Vista on this office PC. In IE10 the ad doesn't randomly expand all over the page, it sits in its box like a good little Toshiba. In both Chrome and Firefox (latest versions), it loads up normally, has a little think, waits until you're not expecting it, and are reading the article. Then: Boo! Zoom! Whoosh! Bugger!
There seems to be a distressing tendency at the moment for web pages to jump around like epileptic fleas as they load. I don't know if this is a change in the way that browsers work or just the number of elements and bits of media from different servers that web-designers are trying to throw out. It used to be that you could load a page, and start reading the article, then other stuff would gradually turn up around the page. Now the whole thing seems to want to jump to whichever element has just loaded. This is something I particularly notice on the iPad browser. Some pages are unreadable for a whole minute, as they bounce around madly.
Funny you should mention Toshiba - if you see a banner ad of theirs at the top of the page just see what happens when the mouse cursor is placed above it (as if often the case by mistake when loading a page) Even if you have the mouse placed over the add as it happens to load it still triggers the size change though, and the ads for the HTC one auto-resize themselves even when you don't hover over them.
The most I've ever seen though are the staff here blaming ad networks for these sorts of things. They appear to take little or even no responsibility for what gets shown here, despite the fact that they run the site.
"The most I've ever seen though are the staff here blaming ad networks for these sorts of things. They appear to take little or even no responsibility for what gets shown here, despite the fact that they run the site."
Not true. We don't use ad networks - unless you include Google under that term. We test all the ads we make ourselves - and we make quite a few. We try to test ads where we can before they go up - but if they misbehave , don't work - we will report them to the supplier. This gets a bit complicated as most ads are supplied by creative ad agencies - whereas our customers are media buyer agencies.
Now, "misbehaving" and "annoying" are not the same thing. We acknowledge that some ads can be annoying - but there again we try harder than most sites here. Typically we run fewer ads per page than our UK competitors, often much fewer, and we never - at least in the UK (don't know about elsewhere) - run those "Welcome" ads - those "skip to site in 21 seconds" full pagers that stop you reading the story.
Finally, we do what we can to prevent so-called remarketing, where behavioural ads follow you around the internet. Our Google ads setting expressly forbids this starting from our site. Unfortunately, this appears to have a limited effect, in practice.
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