The buggy "click here" ad

[Ballbarian]

The nice, low key, unobtrusive ads running down the left nav column and the minimal gif banner in the heading are fine. But the latest gizmo, wizbang, 'everyone else is doing it' Flash just becomes noise and drives folks like me away. One example is that I used to search via Yahoo several years ago, and now I am a google fanatic.

I am not saying that Shrapnel has become a sudden demon because they stuck a Flash ad on the forums, I just love this place so much that I really hate to see it go the Flash route.

Along a similar vein, remember when flashing text was all the rage? Pretty soon all the text is flashing and trying to get your attention and it just becomes an obscene noise.

Uh, I was ranting again wasn't I? Sorry about that. Thanks for listening anyway.

[S.R. Krol]

Ballbarian said:
The nice, low key, unobtrusive ads running down the left nav column and the minimal gif banner in the heading are fine. But the latest gizmo, wizbang, 'everyone else is doing it' Flash just becomes noise and drives folks like me away. One example is that I used to search via Yahoo several years ago, and now I am a google fanatic.

Actually there aren't any ads on the left nav column, those all link to the most recent press releases. The only ad is at the top of the page, and now yes, the corner (which is avoidable), and all that one is doing is pointing out this month's specials.

Now, as far as VFB's issue that will be something that needs to be looked into. Big obscuring purple blobs is definitely not what we're going for here.

[Dedas]

Thank you. I just want to add (again) that I have the exact same issue as vfb, and I also run Linux with the latest version of flash plugin.

[Lingchih]

My suggestion to the website admin would be to use a "sniffer" script, to check what OS the client is using. If they are using Linux, then have the script disable the ad.

[lch]

Browser/OS detection is no solution. Then we're back to designing web sites for each browser individually like it has been the practice over 5 years back.

Funny seeing that here. I think these type of Pagepeel-ads have become famous since the german "AK Vorratsdatenspeicherung" used it to sensitize the german-speaking population about the upcoming laws on storage of communication data. They used a CSS-solution to put it in the top right corner (click for demo) and made Wiki sites explaining how to put it on your own site:
http://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Online-Demo
http://wiki.helge.at/Einbauanleitung (austrian version which adapted the concept)

This lead to a boom of these page peels over all the german-centered web sites.

There is no real Flash support for Linux. The only thing that's there is an outdated flash plugin which is proven to be buggy and leading to the most browser crashes. The only flash plugins that are supported by Adobe are for Windows/Mac, I think.

[Tharsonius]

I have ActiveX deactivated most of the time. It helps a lot against annoying ads.

[capnq]

The Flash code seems to be working just fine in Opera 9.26, but the ad is so unobtrusive that I never saw any reason to mouseover it until I saw this thread.

Telling me to "click here" without giving any indication why I should do it just makes me paranoid.