Keenery

[the_gneech]

The folks who run Keenspot are frankly amazing, not just for their technical skills, which are impressive, but because they run this humongous and troublesome site, while working and/or attending classes, and also publishing comic strips of their own.

I certainly couldn't keep up that kind of workload ... my brain would shatter into a million tiny pieces.

However, because they do have such a heavy load, there are problems that crop up -- not the least of which is that the friggin' servers are going down all the time. This morning, the message boards are AWOL again, and who knows when they'll be back up.

The other problem is one that is prevalent all over the WWW, which is that of revenue vs. the unmitigated evil that is popup ads. I can understand the necessity of ads that will attract attention and actually be worth the money the advertiser has invested in them. I used to make banner ads for a living myself, and I know the kind of pressure the people building them are under.

However, there is no excuse for the "re-pop," a pop-up ad which, when you close the window, just spawns another #&@^!! popup ad! It's sleazy, it drives viewers away, and it hurts your reputation. And because Keenspot runs its ads through a third-party service, we occasionally have these obnoxious things come running through our ad servers. Yesterday, they were all over the place, and people were leaving Keenspot sites to reboot their machine to get out of the loop -- and not coming back.

To the Keen folks' credit, they give the owner of each site the option of running or not running pop-up ads, and until now I have left the ads there, because I want Keenspot to succeed, and that requires revenue. However, if these friggin' re-pops are going to be showing up, I'm going to have to turn the pop-ups off, in order to retain my readership.

And dangit, I want my message boards.

-The Gneech

Comments

Pop-Up Stopper is Your Friend

[tygermoonfoxx.livejournal.com]

Yahell's are particularly noxious. After seeing not one but TWO that bordered on illegal/pornographic while searching through the archives for a G-rated list, I went in search of pop-up stopping software. Pop-Up stopper works fairly well...a little too well, as it doesn't leave you a choice in pop-ups and stops everything, including new browser windows and insets. Well, it's better than being inflicted with borderline naughty ads while you're on a mainstream site.

Re: Pop-Up Stopper is Your Friend

[tobias-b.livejournal.com]

Can you recommend this pop-up stopper?
And maybe give me a link to where to find it?
I'd muchly appreciate it, am quite annoyed by the Casino add that resizes itself all over my window when I try browsing some Keenspot archives. :)

Re: Pop-Up Stopper is Your Friend

[tygermoonfoxx.livejournal.com]

www.panicware.com

It's effective, though you will find that some sites won't let you surf unless the stopper is turned off. If you use multiple windows or you get on a site (like Shockwave or Yahoo games) that has required pop-up windows, you simply hold the control key when you click and that overrides it.

I have the freeware version; it's good enough that I'm considering buying the program.

Re: Pop-Up Stopper is Your Friend

[tobias-b.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll try it out and see how it works for me. ^_^
Does it also affect windows, that you open by right-clicking and select "open in new window" ?

Re: Pop-Up Stopper is Your Friend

[tygermoonfoxx.livejournal.com]

Yup...all you have to do is hold down the contol key, though. I find it preferable to the pop-ups and I think you can configure it not to do that in the paid version.

Re: Pop-Up Stopper is Your Friend

[katayamma.livejournal.com]

If you hold down the shift or control key when clicking a link that'll open a pop-up, it'll allow the pop-up to open.

Sure it's clumsy, but it's better than nothing.

If you want something you can tailor, Norton's Personal Firewall supports popup filtering on a site by site basis. I used to use it to filter advertising domains. :)

[torakiyoshi.livejournal.com]

Funny. I have not seen a pop-up ad come from your site yet. COTC has given me some until Jamie finally got fed up with the whining on his forum. And Keenspace is starting with a couple, but that's all I've seen.

The folks who run Keenspot are frankly amazing, not just for their technical skills, which are impressive, but because they run this humongous and troublesome site, while working and/or attending classes, and also publishing comic strips of their own.

Not to mention putting up with all us whiny readers who demand that everythign work perfectly 110% of the time... Meep! I'm glad I am not in their shoes!

[kevinjdog.livejournal.com]

I just quit pop-ups altogether because of those. And I'm up to here with the forum problems. Like you say, they do a lot of work and deal with a lot of whiny, complainy cartoonists, but the message board these days is my "pay". I don't blame you for feeling upset by it being gone.

[everainsley]

I guess I'm pretty lucky to have my own message board on my own site.. No, it's not big (we have a whole 9 members. go team us.), but as long as the Studio is up, so my board... (which, btw, is the same that they use... I've not had a problem except that the "always log me in" never works.)

...pop ups are evil. especially when I'm trying to pay close attention to something. they're more likely to cause me to LEAVE a site than go "oh, that looks interesting. *click*" ¬¬ @ them

hrm

[katsunewolf.livejournal.com]

I'v never had a problem with popup-Repopups.
The reasion is, due to the code inside the popup that causes it to spawn another one, doesnt fully load the moment it "pops up". If you close the window before the text/images load, you dont get any of the new pop-ups.

The only time a page loads slowly for me, is when theres a pop-up comming up, so i quickly put my paw ready to click the Big ol X, poof, bye bye.

But aye, Pop-Ups suck. And are around all because the Net-Econ is shitty as hell.

^~Kat

[carlfox.livejournal.com]

I use a program called Pop-Up Killer that does a good job of eliminating those nasty things. Unfortunately, I don't have it on my machine here at work, which means when I get one of those pop-up storms, I usually have to kill IE from the Task Manager to get it to stop. Sigh.

I also noticed a rather sneaky one recently...it doesn't have the close button in the upper right, but does have the graphic of one. If you don't notice the lack of a proper menu bar and click the X, it pops up more windows. Evil. Very evil.

[raemonde.livejournal.com]

You might consider adding links to ad-stopping software and making a news post?

I use Proxomitron, which tends to stop just about everything (though it gives me a little trouble with programming stuff that requires pop-ups, but then all I have to do is switch it off and then back on after).

I also recommend Ad-Aware, which (on a somewhat related note) will sweep your system for "spy-ware" and other nasty ad software.

.Rae

Uugh!

[murrrmaiyd.livejournal.com]

I truly hate popups...my computer is sadly behind the times, and when you open too many browser windows it freezes up. The only way to fix this is to turn the machine off without shutting it down properly. Getting it back up again and the proper programs open and getting back online takes between 30 and 45 minutes. It's really old and slow. So anyway, when I go to a site that turns out to have popups, especially multiple popups, it's a real pain in the butt for me, even beyond the irritation of having this big lame ad for something I'll never use, (like a casino, for example), getting in my way. There is this guitar tabulature website...OrangeHoney.com, I think it is, that throws up three or four when you open it up, and then another three or four simultaneously as you leave, and since the first page is only a link page you're leaving almost immediately. My computer nearly has a heart attack on that page! I won't even go there anymore, it's just a recipe for a freeze up. Banner ads I don't mind, they don't really interfere with anything, I wish people'd stick with that type. I've actually seen some interesting banner ads and clicked on some because they don't annoy me. I pretty much won't click popups just as a matter of principle...I find them way too "in your face" and obnoxious. Did ya ever notice they're usually for things like casinos and porn, or contest sites, things like that? Most annoying....

Mur