The angry thread

talisman56 · August 04, 2016, 11:21:21 AM

Pretty much agree with you, Webbo. I did a calculation on one of my regular sites before I installed ABP and the adverts comprised 73% of the total content downloaded. That, IMO, is extracting the urine.

I have noticed one or two sites I have encountered recently have put up a pop up saying that they've detected ABP and it should be disabled to access their site. There it was a case of move along, there are other sites...

With regard to the dog mess analogy, I regard over-advertising on websites as someone's dog trying to mess on my front lawn and me putting up a fence to deter them.

NeMo · August 04, 2016, 09:11:03 PM

Quote from: talisman56 on August 04, 2016, 11:21:21 AM
With regard to the dog mess analogy, I regard over-advertising on websites as someone's dog trying to mess on my front lawn and me putting up a fence to deter them.

Except that's not how it works. Let's say you visit the N Gauge Forum. The forum has to pay for its access to the Internet, and the more "hits" (visitors) per unit of time, the more it has to pay to remain connected. That's because it's using up more of the resources its host supplies, i.e., the computer that serves up the forum pages to each visitor. So the forum has costs, which adverts and donations from the membership help to pay for.

If you install an ad blocker, fewer adverts are "served" up to site visitors. That means less revenue to the website in question. This is a very big deal for anyone running a free to visit website. Rather than "your front lawn" think of the website as a library or museum you choose to visit. The service might be free to you, but there are costs, and someone has to pay for them. Usually, it's advertisers.

I know this isn't a popular opinion, and people with ad blockers have no problem justifying using them. Certainly advertising can be aggressive and disruptive. But when all is said and done, they are, fundamentally, taking something from the website (information and entertainment) without allowing the website creator to cover their costs (via advertising).

Perhaps making an analogy with theft might be overdoing it (though website creators routinely view it that way). It might be better to think of someone who visits a museum in a foreign country (so they aren't supporting it through taxation) but refuses to make a donation (so they aren't supporting it that way either).

Cheers, NeMo

Yet_Another · August 04, 2016, 09:57:46 PM

Except that's not how it works.

The internet is essentially a great big free for all, with some bits cordoned off that you have to pay for. People copy pictures, take screenshots, cut & paste text left right and centre. It's free.

If someone doesn't want to give their stuff away, there are ways and means of protecting it, making people pay or whatever. Another website I visit has it in their TOS that you have to accept the adverts, which is fair enough.

But just because someone (not necessarily the website owner) wants to shove a load of dross into my browser willy nilly doesn't mean that I have to accept it, and I either don't pay, don't go to those websites, or block them.

Good thing this is in the angry thread.

NeMo · August 04, 2016, 10:14:18 PM

Quote from: Yet_Another on August 04, 2016, 09:57:46 PM
Except that's not how it works.
The internet is essentially a great big free for all, with some bits cordoned off that you have to pay for. People copy pictures, take screenshots, cut & paste text left right and centre. It's free.

Are you being serious? Who pays for the electricity running the servers that host your favourite websites? Who pays for the physical connections between computers? And so on. The Internet is not free. Often the stuff that seems free (for example Facebook and free email services) is free to you because they're selling aggregated or personalised data to advertisers and market researchers. But most sites operate on advertising. The more hits, the more advertisers will pay to advertise on that site. It's a lot more sophisticated now because advertisers discriminate between unique visitors, and track where visitors go afterwards, and so on. But the basic principle is as described above. More hits, more revenue from advertisers, more money to pay the bills.

Quote from: Yet_Another on August 04, 2016, 09:57:46 PM
If someone doesn't want to give their stuff away, there are ways and means of protecting it, making people pay or whatever. Another website I visit has it in their TOS that you have to accept the adverts, which is fair enough.

Your conflating two issues. You are quite right that it's very difficult to maintain intellectual property on the Internet. This is a whole other theft issue. We're talking about bandwidth; the cost of serving up web pages to visitors to your site.

Quote from: Yet_Another on August 04, 2016, 09:57:46 PM
But just because someone (not necessarily the website owner) wants to shove a load of dross into my browser willy nilly doesn't mean that I have to accept it, and I either don't pay, don't go to those websites, or block them.

The website owner will have okayed the adverts served by their website unless their website has been hijacked. So yes, they do have the right to send adverts along with their content to your computer. You have the right to not visit that website. But accepting the website content while blocking the advertising (and therefore the revenue that website should be generating) is pretty much shoplifting -- taking stuff without paying for it.

Of course nobody likes obtrusive advertising, and most decent websites don't tend to use that type of advertising precisely because of the ill-will it generates. People won't deliberately go back to websites that have rampant, obnoxious advertising. That's why it's generally acknowledged that the seedier the website, the more aggressive and annoying the advertising -- because those sorts of websites don't depend on repeat business in quite the same way. Hence advertising on, say, the Daily Mail website will be very different to a website hosting bootlegged software.

Quote from: Yet_Another on August 04, 2016, 09:57:46 PM
Good thing this is in the angry thread.

Indeed. And if you were someone employed in web publishing at all ad blockers would be something that make you very angry indeed!

I totally get why some people have them. Everyone likes to get something for nothing, me included! But ethically they're very difficult to justify.

Cheers, NeMo

zwilnik · August 04, 2016, 11:23:37 PM

I don't use as blockers *yet* because I know a lot of web authors who rely on advertising in their sites for income. However I do block all Flash content (buggy, bloated, security risk, crash prone) on my desktop and reserve the right to ad block specific advertising companies if they're primarily pushing scams and clickbait.

Remember it's not just the websites that are paying for bandwidth. The users are too. So if your ads are big and bloaty and making your user experience poor you've only got yourself to blame if they block them. It's a similar balance to TV advertising where they have to restrict it to a certain number of minutes and breaks per hour or viewers would just turn off.

Webbo · August 05, 2016, 12:29:24 AM

I'm fully aware that the web is not free and I'm quite prepared to pay for my usage directly or indirectly (currently donate to Wikepedia). My installation of Adblock was in response to the sorts of pop-up ads that bring my computer to a halt before a key is pressed or block my content. Started happening all too frequently. Adblock seems to take out these offenders, but the banner ads are still there pretty much intact. I do a search on Google and as often as not many of the hits are advertising sites. No problem there and some of these sites are actually useful.

NeMo raises that point that there is a lot of insidious stuff going on on the web such as so called 'free' services that sell your personal information as their way of raising money. To me this is truly obnoxious behaviour and not very well known I expect. A while ago when I realised that the 'free' anti-virus software AVG was passing on my details, I promptly switched to a bought anti-virus program. Probably, AVG and others tell us what they are doing in the fine print, but it is certainly not up front.

Webbo

GeeBee · August 05, 2016, 12:38:37 PM

Hi, folks I have not been able to login to the site for a week why you ask because I am back in the hospital again I managed to last a whole 10 days before the gallbladder created absolute mayhem again and this after the doctor said don't worry we will sort you out in 6 weeks when every thing has settled down HAH 6 days of you can only have sips of water no food and all the tests they ran 3 weeks ago repeated until yesterday when the "Specialist" said you now have a slight jaundice so we will put you on soup and jelly thankfully not in the same bowl 8 hrs later my control board is displaying nil by mouth now back on soup and jelly wonderful

Newportnobby · August 05, 2016, 01:18:06 PM

Oh heck, Graham. Sorry to hear you're back in the wars and hope at least the flavours of the soup and the jelly meet with your approval.

Steve Brassett · August 05, 2016, 01:22:47 PM

I have no problems with adverts - as has been said, the site provider needs to make some money. The issue I have is that the advertisers make the ads more and more complicated to attract your attention. This means that the site takes longer to load, I give up, and the ad doesn't get seen anyway. Counter-productive.

GeeBee · August 06, 2016, 09:30:08 AM

Quote from: newportnobby on August 05, 2016, 01:18:06 PM
Oh heck, Graham. Sorry to hear you're back in the wars and hope at least the flavours of the soup and the jelly meet with your approval.

Hi, Mick to date the soup has consisted of either tomato or chicken I can live with those they have just removed an 11mm gallstone from where it was blocking my pancreas so feeling a bit more human than of late, enough about me how's your back any relief yet ?? I have knicked Pam's iPad she's only had it a couple of weeks so that I can at least keep my brain from turning to mush
Graham

Newportnobby · August 06, 2016, 10:13:29 AM

Despite me pleading for an MRI scan to see if there is any soft tissue (like a disc) out of place I had to go to hospital yesterday for X rays (which can't see soft tissue). My GP will have the results in a couple of weeks (they're very slow readers in Chorley

)
Still, I had fun being pushed around in a wheelchair by my sister whilst I said loudly 'Don't like it!!'

Bealman · August 06, 2016, 10:19:58 AM

I sometimes wonder how you keep your sense of humour, Mick.

I had same thing here in Aus a few weeks ago... x-ray for muscular injury.

My brain hurts.

steve836 · August 06, 2016, 10:22:23 AM

Quote from: newportnobby on August 06, 2016, 10:13:29 AM
Despite me pleading for an MRI scan to see if there is any soft tissue (like a disc) out of place I had to go to hospital yesterday for X rays (which can't see soft tissue). My GP will have the results in a couple of weeks (they're very slow readers in Chorley )
Still, I had fun being pushed around in a wheelchair by my sister whilst I said loudly 'Don't like it!!'

Hope she said "I aint bovvered!"

Skyline2uk · August 06, 2016, 09:22:23 PM

Quote from: newportnobby on August 06, 2016, 10:13:29 AM
Despite me pleading for an MRI scan to see if there is any soft tissue (like a disc) out of place I had to go to hospital yesterday for X rays (which can't see soft tissue). My GP will have the results in a couple of weeks (they're very slow readers in Chorley )
Still, I had fun being pushed around in a wheelchair by my sister whilst I said loudly 'Don't like it!!'

Did you get rolled past the MRI dept and say "Want that one"....

Coat please!

Skyline2uk

austinbob · August 07, 2016, 08:20:15 PM

So sports fans win again... Why???

Not enough to screw main TV channels up for the Olympics - ITV Midsomer murders has been delayed because of a football match.

Why oh Why do sports fans get preference over the rest of the viewers.
There are several BBC and ITV channels with RUBBISH being televised and the TV powers that be could easily scrap the cr

and show sports on these extra channels without screwing up everyone elses viewing.

Every time there's sports on (Wimbledon, Euro 2016, Olympics, Tiddlywinks you name it!!) the rest of the viewing public have to suffer. Nuffs enuff folks.