Am I the only one who...
 

can't stand the inline links to advertising that sites are running now? I'd shut down Procooling before I started inconveniencing readers with popups or junk like that. My policy has always been to just quit regularly going to sites that use this stuff but now lots of top end sites do it (including Overclockers.com).

Do you guys also find it annoying, or can you just ignore it when reading? I want to restate that I am just asking to spark discussion; I am not considering this as a revenue stream.

Yep, almost makes me want to stop reading the articles they post.

I think it was Anandtech that i was pissed at recently - things like 'cpu' or 'processor' becoming links to advertising. Made me check for spyware, didnt have any... had some reg issues though, which could have caused it, but it re-made those issues when I refreshed the page. I guess they dont stop at anything anymore, eh.

Problem is (for advertisers) that everyone that's 'savvy' for the want of a better word, completely ignores advertisements. The only reason I know that cooltechnica and dtek are advertisers here is that ive used them to link to their sites on occasion when they came up in discussion.

Heres one - i only just noticed the change ' Pro/forums - where the big players make big dollars' just then ;)

Bothers me enough that I'm a heavy user of filtering. Chop out the pop ups, smash the flash, de-animate the gif's, kill any java that moves shit, kill any links to dealtime/pricegrabber and the others of their ilk, block counters, crush cookies, pull session id's and referers out of links, stop scrollers, simplify style sheets, etc.

Then I make custom filters for places like overclockers (kill any table that contains a reference to the heatsink factory) and ebay (kill all the little paypal logos) and amdzone (completely remove the right and left colums) and on and on...

I freaks me out when I use a computer that does have all my filters - everything looks so strange.

What is the internet becoming? Seems to me one big ad fest. After all, who does anyone have to answer to for their actions?


P.S. Yes, pH it bothers the hell out of me. I just noticed it the other day on OC'ers.

I don't mind a banner at the top, that's all good.

What bothers me is this new thing that OC is doing, and copying from Tom's, of all people, where some words in articles are "sponsored". :rolleyes:

How long is it going to take for merchants to realize that pop ups actually drive traffic away? (and it's a fact!)

Its definetly extremely annoying and takes focus away from the article. Its probably the ad equivalent of spam.

The popups bug me a bit... only use a simple popup blocker built into Google bar...
As for the inline advertising...
It bothered me at first when I saw it on Tom's..
But I got use to it..
The flashing adds are pretty annoying... but they are there.. I'll just live with it... I guess...
I suppose I could always filter it all like Groth does but all i have to do is ignore it and it doesn't exist... sometimes easier said then done...

I find the inline ads annoying, but the little inset ones that text wraps around aren't too bad (relatively speaking). The ones that torque me off are the kind that completely interrupt the text, and you need to scroll down for 1/3-1/2 page to see the article again... (ala MSN and others...)

The idiotic flashing banners irritate me as well, but I usually just scroll so they're off the page (if possible).

Like others have said, the absolute worst are the ones where a word is an ad link. On some sites, it links to something useful, like a previous related article for more details...

I simply refuse to go to sites like those anymore, unless I can't get info on something anywhere else.

Not really a problem unless I am quickly going page to page to page and there is a pop up on each one. But I just make a mental note on who the company was and put them in the "Never do business with pile".

But I do appreciate the fact the procooling does not do those, not to mention that you don't have the front page with so much damn flash that it takes 20minutes to load up like another site I frequent.

Well Procooling runs at a pretty large loss if you consider the total hosting/bandwidth costs every month. Joe covers half with www.midwestlan.com, and I pick up half with sponsors. I also rely on vendors to supply me with review parts rather than buying them myself. So sites with much larger monthly traffic, no other sites to share the cost with, and an urge to be independent by buying the items they test themselves have a much harder path to take. I'm sure noone thinks "you know what'd really round out this web site design? Some flash banners and a popup or two" or "**** the readers; they'll come anyway and I'll get moneyhats from this ad strategy". It's more the last resort of someone trying to make sure they can continue to offer their site for consumption.

why not ask for paypal?

$1 x the 5,000 people that read OCers a day (just a guess) = lotsa money

just threaten to have to use annoying ads, and the paypal account will overflow

sure...for a month or two. But that isn't a sustainable economic model. You can move to a subscription-based type setup but that doesn't always work either. The best implementation of this I've seen is shacknews.com. If you pay to join their fileshack service, you get no wait uncapped downloads of game demos and patches, exclusive access to some closed betas (EQ2 was the last one), and you can opt to turn off all advertising on their website. If you aren't a subscriber, you have to put up with wait for a limited amount of download bandwidth, 100kB/sec cap on speeds, and shacknews ads. This makes sense to me. I'm not sure how a site like ocers or procooling would do something like this though.

That's not half bad actually.

ProCooling needs to find something that people are going to pay for on a regular basis. I doubt good water block testing is it unfortunatly.... Anyone have any ideas?

Procooling's doing all right. I get offers all the time to test wbs under NDA for $$. I don't do it because I feel that it would be hard to maintain "objective reviewer" status if I were helping to develop some of the wbs on the market though.

I agree, PH.

It doesn't really bother me when websites use banner ads or even those adds where they are in the middle of the article and the words "wrap around" it. I don't even mind the flash ads as long as they are tastefull and load fast. I understand that hosting a site is not cheap and since the content I am getting is free I can understand why they need to use those types of adds.

However, the kind of crappy ass adds that anandtech is using where the actual words in the article are advertisers links really annoys me. It distracts and takes away from the article. So yea, thats all I have to say about that. As you can tell, I feel pretty strongly about the matter.

Also popups are a bitch. Use Opera, the greatest browser on the planet, and you will never have to worry about them.

<off topic>
Delirious, I really like your avatar. I was listening to Jessica by TMBG while scrolling through the thread, and came to your post just as the song started. It was really cool how the song and your avatar seemed to sync up. Had to stop and look at it for a couple minutes until the song ended. Was really cool.
</off topic>

Any and all adds that are necessary to keep procooling alive would be more than acceptable. You have a real tuff job bro. You are a site stuck in the middle of survival and satisfying different people all of which you will never be able to satisfy and the ones you do cater to happen to be the minority.

BillA said something recently that kind of made me take another look at my own opinion about the site. His comment was actually aimed at all the people that were commenting (me included) on how JD should record sounds for people to make their own judgement calls on. He said that his site would never be called "prosilence". That completely changed my opinion about the site. He is right, this is procooling, not approximatlycooling or whatdoyouthinkcooling, this is just the facts cooling aka procooling.

I say all of this because I know that this site is very, very, very well known and respected and that it could have tons more hits and tons more members (which would mean a tiny bit more money) if only peeps were a little more friendly. And if you would just do this and if a little of this and that but....and then all of a suddon this is nobackbonebowstosponsorscooling. So if the choice is integrity and adds or wishy washy and no adds then I choose integrity.

And trust me that is a hard opinion for me to hold because I am one that has seen really good peeps come and go over the years (and I know it is because this is not a friendly place sometimes) and I always wanted a more community site here and more helpful/patient peeps but for all its faults it is procooling.com, loved by a few but respected by all (even the sites you have pissed off know it even if they won't say it).

And I'd argue back that there's plenty of community here at ProCooling. Forums are a transient thing, and as such people will come and go here just as they will anywhere else. Just because the people around here aren't as "noob friendly" as in some forums doesn't mean that there's no sense of community here... personally I enjoy lurking here more than I do anywhere else, and it's because of the colourful and knowledgeable (and often helpful) people first and foremost. Sure, it may not suit everyone's style, and yeah, it may be a bit exclusive, and maybe even a bit dysfunctional. But it is what it is, and that makes it a great community to me.

right on, skulemate.

Its disfunctional and abusive, just like family aught to be.
:-D

The absolute worst is when a script inserts ad links into your own forum posts. The first time I saw this happen to one of my posts (at nforcershq.com), I was so offended, I tried to edit out every link by misspelling all the keywords. But as soon as I edited one out, the script picked up another keyword. When I finished, my post looked like it had been written by a 5 year old. So I just stopped posting altogether.

I've actually seen people asking around for where they can get something like this. Thankfully, I have not heard of any of them, but I did steer the people toward what would seem to work for it, using a little PHP to do it. I personally hate them, but I can't help being helpful sometimes.
:shrug:

I find it ironic that OCers can't be bothered to put together a proper search/indexing script (I can never find ANYTHING there) but they can learn enough php to insert link ads all over.

Or (more likely) it's some script that was provided by the advertisers with almost no interaction on the site's part.

In any case it's annoying as hell

well what would be nice is something that didnt sponsor words but offered quick examples or deffinitions of common used acronyms or other items.

Hot linking texts COULD be useful and originally it was used for that. But like most things it was whored out to just be an advertising tool now...

keep in mind the procooling search engine has an index of OC'rs ;) we figure if they cant do it we can do it for them hehe.

Yea I remember doing that with javascript on the graduate research page I built in college. Little boxes with definitions and links to more info whenever you clicked on them. Was a pita; would be much nicer with php/sql though

next time you get yourself in a situation like that...
post an image of the text...
no links can be inserted that way...
my 2¢