Invasive and insulting ads

I understand the necessity of ads and I thank you guys for taking care of the bad ones. I do think a little more screening and vigilance would be nice. 
Scam ads (anything that promises something free) and ads with sound should not be allowed. 

Music and music related ads are totally fine and frankly those advertisers are going to get the most bang for their buck here anyway.

On a little aside, I fell for a spam scam e-mail that promised a free laptop, they kept making you jump through all of these offer hoops and once I saw it basically never ends and realized that I had been suckered I quit.  Maybe I was just one hoop away from that free laptop.   

On a positive note, one of the offers was BMG Music Club, which generally sucks in terms of their progressive music selections (I pretty much have all the good stuff there), but I did get my first Porcupine Tree album (In Absentia) there.  Of course, I had to go to other sources for the rest of their stuff.


Edited by Slartibartfast - December 08 2007 at 10:43

I agree with MO. Ads are OK, but the iPOD ads and especially the Malware thing (is must be a virus-installer or something because it keeps coming back) are very invasive and very insulting and make PA no fun to come to. I'll gladly sit back with a google ad thing at the top or bottom of the screen, just no pop-ups or audio ads.

Looks like you missed this thread MO:

Man Overboard wrote: If the ads were reasonable and non-intrusive/destructive, would it really hurt to let them through, rather than having your cake and eating it too by blocking them?

As I've stated previously in this thread, I have no problem with a few visual ads to help pay for the site.  It is, however, EXTREMELY irritating to have the ads make noise/speak every time I refresh the page, especially since I have music playing on my computer 90 percent of the time I spend on this site.

I have an ad-blocker and I still get many ads, including the one that Peter refered to. Of all the web pages that I regularly visit, PA is I think the most intrusive in terms of ads.

Edited by mosni lamf - November 28 2007 at 17:05

Look...  my tone might be harsh and weary, but it's only because I've got the best interests of the site at heart, and I want to see this problem solved.  It hurts a bit to be given such an insult as to be completely ignored and to have the proposal mistaken for a common complaint...  

There is a cause and effect relationship to blocking ads.  The more they're blocked, the more have to be unloaded to compensate for the users who use bandwidth but do not see the ads.  The more they compensate, the worse the ads get, as anyone who's been here for over a year has probably seen. 

I'm not asking for the world here.  Only that people step back for a moment, examine the problem at its roots, and try to come out with a solution that will make the users and the administrators both happy.  I've outlined a -possible- solution to this in the thread I linked above.  Perhaps this can be a starting point to bring the advert situation back down to a reasonable level, like many other self-sufficient sites with a similar userbase.  Or if the idea is completely out of the question, maybe it can at least be an inspiration to show that it -is- fixable, and that it should be.  I'm sure that no one -really- like being bombarded with ads.

If the ads were reasonable and non-intrusive/destructive, would it really hurt to let them through, rather than having your cake and eating it too by blocking them?  I don't want to see ProgArchives vanish, either in a muddled haze of spyware -or- from a lack of server funding.  I've been here far too long and have far too much attachment to ever leave, even if at times it's exactly what I feel like doing. 


Edited by Man Overboard - November 26 2007 at 04:30

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