Hard Light Productions Forums

Site Management => Site Support / Feedback => Topic started by: Ace on March 30, 2007, 06:13:33 pm

Title: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Ace on March 30, 2007, 06:13:33 pm
I can tolerate Google text ads, but to put it bluntly ditch the damn image ads, especially the political ones.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Dark Hunter on March 30, 2007, 11:46:30 pm
I agree. If possible, get rid of the political nonsense. I get enough of that from school and television.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Turey on March 31, 2007, 02:21:16 am
I can tolerate Google text ads, but to put it bluntly ditch the damn image ads, especially the political ones.

Or at least make sure we only get Republican political ads.  :P
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: vyper on March 31, 2007, 07:55:57 am
What the hell are you lot on about? :wtf:
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Flipside on March 31, 2007, 08:10:34 am
I'm getting images for this chat room that, apparently, involves lots of schoolgirls in small tops and miniskirts.

Why did these places never exist when I was 15 :nervous:
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Polpolion on March 31, 2007, 10:30:39 am
Quote
Why did these places never exist when I was 15

Was the internet even around back then? :p

j/k

:nervous: please don't hurt me :nervous: I'm sorry :(
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Flipside on March 31, 2007, 10:36:26 am
:lol: We had to put up with Bulletin Boards, which you got at the astounding speed of 300 Bits per Second. ;)

Obviously, unless you were into ASCII art and had a really good imagination, the options were somewhat limited ;)
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Aardwolf on March 31, 2007, 05:03:01 pm
I agree with the OP. Hard Light doesn't need this politics crap. We've already got plenty of people arguing fervently for both sides, we don't need ads that say 'America deserves experience. America deserves straight talk. McCain' I mean, what the hell is that?
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Bobboau on March 31, 2007, 05:26:57 pm
I hadn't even notice, meh money's money.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Flipside on March 31, 2007, 06:52:09 pm
I find it interesting that everyone notices the political ones but not the Gold-farming and power-levelling ones :)

Ads aren't going to convert people over to ol' Oven chips, it'll take more than that, I'd just suggest following what Sandwich has already asked you to do, i.e. if you're not interested, don't click on 'em. If it helps pay the bills, then all for the good :)
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: achtung on March 31, 2007, 10:24:54 pm
A complaint for the sake of complaining.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Aardwolf on March 31, 2007, 10:51:56 pm
No, it's not a complaint for the sake of complaining. It's a complaint for the sake of GETTING RID OF THE THING because it has no place here.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Flipside on March 31, 2007, 11:35:38 pm
Yes it does, it's up there, at the top of the board :p

Seriously though, the Admin have no say about what appears on those ads, they can't pick and choose what to display, and, quite frankly, they need the money. If this site is to remain functional, it is going to need to keep an income. The BtRL Demo has just come out, this means an increase in bandwidth usage to an already very expensive accont.

If Admin had another way of getting money for the site, I'm sure they'd entertain ideas, but this place costs over $100 a month to run according to the news post, that's one hell of an overdraft to keep by goodwill alone.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,46269.0.html

So, no-one is forcing you to click on the ads, but if they help keep the site open, I'm perfectly willing to tolerate them, better to have ads at the top than no forum underneath them ;)
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Windrunner on April 01, 2007, 08:20:27 am
Let me give you a dose of reality,we are in a big need of MONEY and to be honset I don't care if there is a ad to re-elect Bush senior as long we get some money to keep this site up and running. The lack of donations have forced several of us admins to pay out of our own pocket.

Like Flip said no-one is forcing you to click on the ads.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Ace on April 01, 2007, 11:22:08 pm
Partisan ads mean fewer clicks, so even from a pure profit-driven view they are not useful.

Once again this is not an issue with having ads themselves, but ads which are inappropriate. It is no different than the last time this was experimented with and the various sex/dating/etc. ads which lead to some complaints.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Tamlin on April 02, 2007, 12:03:54 am
Let me give you a dose of reality,we are in a big need of MONEY and to be honset I don't care if there is a ad to re-elect Bush senior as long we get some money to keep this site up and running. The lack of donations have forced several of us admins to pay out of our own pocket.

Like Flip said no-one is forcing you to click on the ads.
It's sad that they're are those how B**ch about this.. donate and shut up.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Col. Fishguts on April 02, 2007, 05:58:02 am
I'm more annoyed by the GodLovesSoldiers ad that seems to follow me from subforum to subforum :nervous:
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Dysko on April 02, 2007, 11:59:43 am
I was going to post a very similar pic, but at the moment I can't access Imageshack.

Though it's funny :lol:
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: MP-Ryan on April 02, 2007, 01:05:58 pm
Firefox + AdBlockPlus = Your friend.

But maybe not HLPs.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Mongoose on April 02, 2007, 05:27:12 pm
Considering that one spends 99% of one's time in a forum index/thread staring at an area other than the very top of the page, I don't see how a few random banner ads are all that annoying.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Fury on April 02, 2007, 11:40:08 pm
Firefox + AdBlockPlus = Your friend.
Don't get me started on ad-blockers. I already ranted enough about those in http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,46269.0.html
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: achtung on April 04, 2007, 04:52:57 pm
Let me give you a dose of reality,we are in a big need of MONEY and to be honset I don't care if there is a ad to re-elect Bush senior as long we get some money to keep this site up and running. The lack of donations have forced several of us admins to pay out of our own pocket.

Like Flip said no-one is forcing you to click on the ads.

I forgot about donations!

Here, just gave you twenty bucks.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Sandwich on April 05, 2007, 03:40:15 am
Thanks for the donation, dude. :)

We don't plan on getting political at all. This means that if political ads for one thing or another show up, they show up, and we aren't going to intervene. I hate to be so blunt, but live with it.

Or stop posting political threads... the ads ARE supposed to be context-sensitive, after all. :p
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: miskat on April 05, 2007, 02:36:49 pm
Complaining about the ads seems silly to me.  Either we have HLP with ads you can simply ignore, or we have no HLP at all.  No thought required, obviously, I'm all over the former.

Besides, if you sit back and calm down, shove your mind into the right perspective and think for a second, those political ads become quite humorous.

Then again, I can usually find something funny in anything.

Anyone up for changing the sound effect on the ML-16 to some nine year old saying "Pew pew!"?    :D
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: takashi on April 06, 2007, 09:56:22 pm
or "DIVE DIVE DIVE" to "VOTE FOR JOHN"? i agree, atleast the presidential ones have to go.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: MatthewPapa on April 07, 2007, 09:19:05 am
why do you non americans even care if there are political ads or not?
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: takashi on April 07, 2007, 06:27:56 pm
im IN america.

...

that and a good majority of people ahte a good majority of poltical candidates.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 08, 2007, 02:03:14 am
As far as making money goes, I did mention that I would love to see a return of some sort of HLP store, and that I think it could be 100% legal if done carefully, and a few things are checked on first:

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php/topic,46413.msg946695.html#msg946695

Also, it seems I'm not seeing the google ads right now, or any ads for that matter.  Did someone mass click them and cause us to lose them again?  Or is there just some other issue?
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Fury on April 08, 2007, 02:04:31 am
Ads are working fine.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 08, 2007, 02:15:45 am
Ok, well, I'm not seeing any ads in Firefox, or IE, and I don't have any other third-party adblock software installed.  I do remember seeing google text ads as recently as a couple days ago, but I have no clue why I'm not now.  Does it stop showing them if you've seen so many in X amount of time?  I do want to support you guys as much as possible, but if I'm not getting the ads it would be hard to ever click on them, like has been said.   I'll see about disabling any internal blocking FF and IE might do, but if anyone else has any ideas why this would happen I'd like to know.  Thanks.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: miskat on April 08, 2007, 04:24:48 pm
lol They blend in real well, if all that's up at the time is the text-ads.  All black background with white text, is all.  Easily missed.  =P
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 08, 2007, 05:11:54 pm
No really, there's absolutely no text ad on my page when I'm on my own computer, but when I'm in my school's computer lab I see them.  In my room, I just see a little maroon square, where the ad should be.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: MP-Ryan on April 11, 2007, 12:55:32 am
No really, there's absolutely no text ad on my page when I'm on my own computer, but when I'm in my school's computer lab I see them.  In my room, I just see a little maroon square, where the ad should be.

Then you have an ad-blocker at work.  Could be firewall, anti-virus, or browser extensions.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 11, 2007, 02:13:44 am
Then since it's IE and FF both, the extension would have to be google toolbar.  I wasn't aware they blocked their own text ads though.  As for firewall, I have zero blocking me from the rest of the internet except choice filters the campus chooses to apply, but those are limited to plain old fashioned port blocking.  That leaves antivirus.  Does anyone know if AVG is known for blocking ads like that?  I don't recall it being that intrusive.  I'll about disabling it though.  Well, I also installed Spybot with that option about blocking known ad servers checked, but I didn't think google ads was included in that was it?
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Fury on April 11, 2007, 02:23:37 am
Uninstall google toolbar, that should confirm whether it's the culprit.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Sandwich on April 11, 2007, 04:00:59 am
What is in your HOSTS file?
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 11, 2007, 04:06:51 am
A lot.  I mean a lot.  Too much to post here, it's more than 1mb.  But it's the standard file that comes with Spybot I believe.  I'll try going to the default one and seeing if that does it, if the google toolbar disabling doesn't.

Edit:  I just remembered, I don't think it's spybot, I think it came with K-Lite, the old P2P program (yes, it's been that long since I reformatted).
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Fury on April 11, 2007, 04:12:52 am
:wtf: You've practically filled your hosts file with god knows what? :wtf:
Oh the agony... Seriously.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 11, 2007, 04:18:11 am
It's just a little hack called the supertrick, it takes a bunch of well known ad hosts and redirects them to 127.0.0.1.  My guess is that google ads is in there, as well as several CSS hosts, because there's a few pages I've had issues seeing in the past, and it's just starting to click that maybe that's why.  I'll be disabling it since it's probably so outdated it doesn't even block the current ad hosts anyway.  But it wasn't 'god knows what', it was K-Lite knows what.  And, seeing as how K-Lite didn't seem to mind shoving it to Kazaa, I trusted them to know what :P  Well, almost, I still browsed through the list myself to see what type of stuff was being redirected.  Nothing seemed amiss.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Fury on April 11, 2007, 04:23:18 am
Still, that's just going way overboard. Hosts file should be used only when it is really necessary. Filling it with entries worth of 1Mb is just silly. :p
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 11, 2007, 04:42:39 am
They can't help it that there's over 1mb worth of ad servers

But yeah, I do see some of the problems it's probably been causing me, so I guess it's time to retire the ol' supertrick finally.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Sandwich on April 11, 2007, 05:39:51 pm
Actually, if you've had that HOSTS file around since the K-Lite days, you're probably way overdue for a Windows reinstallation anyway. :p
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: chief1983 on April 11, 2007, 06:22:36 pm
Yeah, I keep thinking that, but it's such a pain.  And every time there's some little thing that's ticking me off so much I want to redo it, I get it fixed just before I'm on the brink of reformatting and then decide it's not worht it now.  I even went through a mobo swap without reformatting, that impressed me.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Vretsu on April 12, 2007, 07:14:45 pm
It's far, far too late. Your political ads have already brainwashed me.

Vote Mckaine! Surrender is NOT an option!  :mad:
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Nuke on April 14, 2007, 06:49:55 am
dont you see that the political crap is here because thats what google ad spiders found here. a bunch of forumites engaged in useless political debate. im not suprised one bit that they are there. but seriously all im getting is john mccain. is any one else running in this election? well no, according to google. :D
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: vyper on April 14, 2007, 08:47:59 am
According to google this thread is related to Permaculture in Ireland.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Dysko on April 14, 2007, 11:54:00 am
According to Google this thread is related also to military aircraft pictures.

Oh, wait...

 :D
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Desert Tyrant on April 14, 2007, 12:37:30 pm
A complaint for the sake of complaining.
No wonder why you got banned from dreamhost.
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: Vretsu on April 14, 2007, 08:26:11 pm
A complaint for the sake of complaining.
No wonder why you got banned from dreamhost.

Non sequiter alert!  :wtf:
Title: Re: Ditch the political ads
Post by: takashi on April 21, 2007, 10:07:48 pm
quick@ change the track of discussion! im getting ads for pirate sites!