Popups

Every 5 seconds (No exaggeration) I hear a "click" which is the sound of a popup bring blocked. FOr the 10 minutes I have been on forums, my popup blocker count has gone from 120 to 160. 40 popups in 10 minuts is around 8 popups a minute. Do something?

Nope, just deal. We've already had like 2-3 threads on this. UGO's fault.

Indeed. If you can't live with the popups or the clicks or whatever, you can always email UGO's admins, as they are the ones that make the deals with advertisers in order to pay their hosting bills. We can't be forwarding every complaint we get here about this. Were the popups damaging your system or something, that would be another matter.

1. Use a real browser if you're not. This means anything except IE basically.
2. Use popup/ad blocker software that doesn't feel the necessity to obnoxiously draw your attention to the fact it is blocking ads.
3. Use your operating system's hosts file to block common advertising servers by making their host names resolve to localhost (127.0.0.1). I have blocked almost all ad servers that exist in this manner. I don't even see a banner ad on Doomworld, let alone popups.

Nevermind. I found if you leave one popup open, none others will come up. Ty

yw

Quasar said:

3. Use your operating system's hosts file to block common advertising servers by making their host names resolve to localhost (127.0.0.1). I have blocked almost all ad servers that exist in this manner. I don't even see a banner ad on Doomworld, let alone popups.

I'm using Firefox, can I get some simple instruction on how to do this in XP?

I enjoy fighting all the popups personally. Which is why I haven't installed a blocker. It's a mental exercise to tell exactly when the page finishes loading and a popup is imminent, so you can press "stop (loading the page)" before it loads.

Quasar said:

1. Use a real browser if you're not. This means anything except IE basically.

Yeah, virtual (not real) browsers like IE should be left out of the real world. But they do make good coasters.

Dr. Zin said:

I'm using Firefox, can I get some simple instruction on how to do this in XP?

Here, but note the possible issue with the system slowing down. The DNS caching service likes to eat up memory by caching the entire HOSTS file. The service can be turned off (as the instructions tell you how to do), but I only recommend doing that if you have broadband.

Dr. Zin said:
I'm using Firefox, can I get some simple instruction on how to do this in XP?

I don't think Firefox will pay attention to it. At least it doesn't on my computer (it's Windows 98, though), and I've heard it doesn't use it (at least in Windows).

But why bother? Firefox has integrated popup blocking, and you can get the Adblock plugin to block ads as well.

Using HOSTS is good for IE (and other browsers that read the file) if you want to generally allow ads but wish to block specific ad (or whatever) hosts. Like the ads from a site you visit daily, for example.

what browser + blocker are you using? honestly, i couldn't stand something that required the trick you mentioned, much less made some dumb "clicking" sound every time

myk said:

I don't think Firefox will pay attention to it. At least it doesn't on my computer (it's Windows 98, though), and I've heard it doesn't use it (at least in Windows).

Of course it does. Every program uses the HOSTS file. It's built into the operating system.

Bloodshedder said:
Of course it does. Every program uses the HOSTS file. It's built into the operating system.

Yeah... it affects the TCP/IP layer. Actually, now I see what's wrong with what I was saying. It isn't working on my computer because I disabled it by renaming it (I recall why as well; it leaves ugly "action cancelled" messages or something like that in place of what it affects).

Had to update Firefox to get Adblock but now the popups are dead, along with the banners.

I'm using Firefox, and whenever I finish loading a page on the forums, the display jumps to the bottom of the document. Is this happening to anyone else? It's rather aggravating.

Jonathan said:
Is this happening to anyone else? It's rather aggravating.

No, but I enabled Adblock yesterday, so that might be the reason. Is the ad being displayed? I think perhaps it used to happen to me before, when I wasn't using Adblock.

Jonathan said:

I'm using Firefox, and whenever I finish loading a page on the forums, the display jumps to the bottom of the document. Is this happening to anyone else? It's rather aggravating.

That was happening to me until I got Adblock.

However, now Firefox has some stupid spell checker in it. Where can I turn this thing off?

Stupid? Are you kidding? Don't you know how many poor misspellings this feature prevents? If you want to be so crazy as to turn it off, Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Check my spelling as I type.

Often as not when I make a mis-spelling it is another word, so the spellcheck doesn't help me. I generally proofread my posts anyway.

It is irritating to have the browser assert that I have spelled words wrong that are in fact real words, but are not of broad enough usage to be in its database. Plus alot of internet terms are compound words (like gameplay) which it again flags as incorrect.

Thanks for the help.

At least there's no more of those "Soldner: Secret wars" ads, they used to be flash things that would "fade in", except on dialup they'd fade in very slowly, so you'd click on the "invisible" ad without realising it was there. I vowed to NEVER buy the game because of that. And i never even heard about it again so i suppose everybody else did too

One of the pop-ups had an alert, and when you tried to kill it it would spawn another window, which would then spawn another window when you closed it. You endeded up getting four popups before it finally stopped. That is sleazy.

I use IE and never get pop ups on this site.

Neither do I-- however, it's annoying when the pop-up notification appears while I was trying to click on a link.

AdMuncher cleans out all popups for me and doesn't even make a click noise.

Apart from that you can allways go into the controlpanel of your windows, go into sound, and wipe the file referenced to the name "Start explore". That mutes the sound totally.