Apr
26th
2014
Talking Advertisement · 4:18am Apr 26th, 2014
I had FimFiction whitelisted on my ad-blocker to avoid negating their ad revenue, but two of the ads just started blathering at me simultaneously. That is a hard no. I will not tolerate talking ads on sites. Sound-producing advertisements in general are walking over a pit on paper flooring. Talking ads are right out. They're intrusive, and quick to discover that I've lined the pit with spikes.
No more FimFiction whitelist from me. If that hits someone's ad revenue... good.
Multiple talking advertisements at once is just noise, anyways. Any power that one could have is ruined when there's another. Who let that through?
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Causal Quill · 521 views
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Yeah, I did the same thing a while ago. At first I thought it was another of my tabs doing it, but once I saw it was fimfic, it was just like "Nope. Line crossed. Forget it. Talking ads are a blight and a big reason I have AdBlock to begin with."
They are as bad as the commercials that play IN Wal-Mart. (Whatever marketing douche thought it was a good idea to have commercials blaring IN the store needs to get hit by a bus.)
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What really galls me is that the "Blocking Ads?" box promises unobtrusive ads. As long as that was true, I was willing to give them their whitelisting. Now it's staring at me as a broken promise.
As far as I can tell, the talkie isn't coming from the obvious ad boxes, but it's coming from somewhere on the page. Something evil lurks in Google Ads. Well, noisy at least. Not a fun thing to happen at work.
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It is possible that the talking ads are sneaking on, and knighty is not entirely aware of them, given how long it took me to notice them. In which case perhaps knighty should be told. Until something is done about them though, Ad-Block stays where it is.
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It's worth noting that I had to be on the same page of FimFiction for a long time before the talking happened. An advertisement may be sneaking a sound clip past attempts to screen them out by putting ten minutes of dead air in front of it. (I'm not attesting that to be the specific duration.)
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That may really further point to knighty not being aware of the issue, actually, because that's what happened with me. Tab I had open for quite a while was the culprit. I really suspect it's something sneaking in.
As opposed to Deviant art, which is lousy with the damn things, so that you buy a premium.
Oh I'm much more likely to blacklist a site for shoddy service provision and bad design decisions than obtrusive ads.
On a completely unrelated note
, fimfiction's pages are all an ugly drab grey, provide a laughably pitiful tagging system, poor moderation, even poorer search functions, and more.
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I think you misunderstood me. I only blacklisted the advertisements. I love the rest of the site.
2047808 No, I understand you, I'm just hurting ad revenue because of problems with the site, not the advertisements.
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Oh! You DID understand me! I just didn't understand you.
Sorry about that.
2047915 No problem.
Much of the time it is some shady 3rd party company that is trying to sneak something past Google to get that crap on websites. Sometimes exploiting a weakness in the code or flat out hacking is involved. Once Google finds out about it, the problem is usually taken care of.
I have not seen a add with audio on this site in weeks so I think Google took care of it.
I'm listening to talking advertisements on this page right now, because I'm using somebody else's Mac and haven't installed an ad-block. And, yes, I installed ad-block on my machines just because of fimfiction's talking ads, which have been around for a month or two or three now.
I think I sent knighty an email about it, but of course I never heard back.
2047747 The talking started maybe 10 seconds after I opened this page. No advertisement on the page looks like it's the one.
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In fact, I suspect that if someone gives you a flash file and says "here, this is my ad, please run it", working out if it will play sound is equivalent to the halting problem.[1] Unfortunately, that means there's no certain way to know if flash ad is good or not other than decompile and try and analyse each one via painstaking effort. Basically, conditions are ripe for things turn into a game of whack-a-mole between advertisers, middlemen, and site owners.
Of course, some advertising middlemen are clearly better than other about discouraging ads with sounds than others.
[1] Proof: run the flash file in a flash interpreter that halts if the flash file issues instructions to play sound.
I can vouch that talking ads is current; I just had one play on me. I muted it, I'm not using sound anyway. (This isn't my primary browser, however.)