Popups on LiveJournal? Say it ain't so.

[soph]

Hi there,

New member of this community checking in. Hi! :)

I wanted to crosspost an entry here which I wrote in my personal journal today. It doesn't deal directly with the issue of not wanting LJ ads, but it deals with an issue some people have been having with popups on LiveJournal. Popups on LiveJournal? Say it ain't so.
23rd June 2006, 11:58 (

Comments

[foxfirefey]

Hey, you're a wee bit of a slow poke! ::wink:: We could've scoped lj_ads if you were a bit earlier, teehee.

Although I'm in agreement that this isn't directly LJ's fault, per se, I disagree that they have no control over it. They could control it by refusing to run Flash ads. People begged for no Flash ads, even users otherwise open to ads. The Flash ads are just being used for annoying animation, anyway. GIFs can animate (tho' perhaps not as gratuitously in a small space as Flash), and they never have launched popups or popunders, to my knowledge.

Now I'm going to post about FlashBlock.

PS

[foxfirefey]

If you could be a dear and ad a link to the lj_ads post, that'd be awesome!

Re: PS

[soph]

Oh, you were talking to me? My bad, I didn't see it before.

I went and added a link in the post.

Re: PS

[foxfirefey]

Sweet, I figure it's good to cross reference! Thank you very much!

Re: PS

[soph]

I use Flashblock all the time. It's awesome, and was actually very helpful in finding out what the cause of the popup was - as the popup only appeared once the Flash ad was unblocked by clicking on it. That meant that the popup was directly related to the Flash ad and was almost certainly not an LJ customisation.

And sorry for being slow. :) I'd have posted earlier but I got sidetracked.

Re: PS

[foxfirefey]

FlashBlock is awesome, right now I'm just trying to find options for the other browsers, too. We try to be fairly browser agnostic. That reminds me, recently I gave someone instructions for user css styles in Camino, I should add that to the big instruction list...

Also note that this post is a PERFECT example of a good, informative post relating to ads on LJ. I've tried to keep this community from having nothing but "OMG WE HATE ADS AND DON'T WANT THEM" posted over and over, and tried to focus on information and in depth discussions.

[jamesd]

It's completely routine for people to try to circumvent site ad rules to place ads on properties where they aren't allowed. Sad, but that's the way a fair part of the ad placement reselling business works and why porn ads sometimes show up on sites with strong anti-porn rules, for example. Company X might buy a spot, sell the spot to a reseller and the reseller may itself sell it on via a couple of extra levels until you end up with someone who simply doesn't care about the terms and uses the highest revenue ad it has available.

LiveJournal does have at least one internet ad pro so we pretty much have to assume LiveJournal knew of the way the business works and chose not to prohibit spot resale and third party ad serving.

[foxfirefey]

I know we've discussed distrust of the security of ad networks before. Now we have the proof.

Dubious banners were slipping in all over when Google was still serving the banners. It's been better (if exceedingly boring) since they disabled that...until now.