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Soldato
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This might be interesting; then again, it might not be…

What are your views on advertising online, how it impacts your ‘surfing’ of the web, and whether you use Ad Blockers?

For me, I have been online since the 90s, when I used to run up 100s of pounds in phone bills, off of the back of the latest FreeServe dial up – advertisements back then were present, but not at all as intrusive as they are now – aside from the dodgy ones that would install premium rate diallers that is!

As the years have passed, I have found that adverts are taking up more and more space, so much so, that in instances, adverts will often take up over half of the displayed page! They are also far more intrusive – often starting up audio/video without being prompted or blocking your view of the website until you click to close. And those bloody hot words (or whatever they’re called) – where you drift your mouse past them, and suddenly have a new pop up showing you results for the word.

Mobile browsing only amplifies this, for me at least, as the smaller ‘mobile friendly’ view, is often nearly saturated by advertisements!

For me, modern advertising online, feels like you’re walking down your high street – and there are chuggers at every other step, asking you to hear their plight, or to sign up for something.

So, I have been an advocate of using ad blockers – originally things that modified the HOSTS file, then browser plug-ins, and now root-based tools (for Android) and even a Raspberry Pi running Pi-Hole. But this leads to a new scourge – the begging messages…. “Our website is funded by advertisers” etc etc etc, or worse, the ones who prevent you accessing their content until you whitelist them.

For me, no website is irreplaceable, so if they fold or block me – I just move on elsewhere. If the adverts weren’t so intrusive, I would consider allowing them, but it seems that lots of sites seem to prioritise advertisements over their own actual content.

I got excited (well, maybe not excited) recently, when I saw a release that mentioned Chrome would start blocking a bunch of these annoying intrusive adverts – but alas, they still plague the internet; so it’s back to running ad blockers!

Anyone else hate adverts? Do you actively block them, do you whitelist any, do you have any moral pangs of guilt when you see the begging?
 
I could live with the adverts if the bandwidth overhead wasn't so high. I used to read the Telegraph online and buy it at the weekends but I gave up reading online altogether because the adverts were so intrusive and there was 3 or 4 times as much bandwidth required for the adverts as the content. I don't bother buying the paper anymore as I've fallen out of the habit of reading online. I wouldn't think about a digitial subscription because of the adverts. They've killed me as a customer.

I use UBlock on Firefox and nothing on Chrome. Some sites I'll only visit with UBlock because they are hard to use, for the less intrusive ones I use Chrome. The intrusive sites have literally forced me into and ad block arms race.
 
I use ad block pro. I hate it when you have to wait for the adverts to download first before the content. Not sure if its an issue any more, but flash adverts that use to use 100% of your CPU used to annoy the hell out of me. I tend to leave chrome with a few hundred tabs open.
You can choose to disable the ad blocker on particular sites if you want to, and it remembers the setting.
You can block the ones in skype with the hosts file too - don't tell me M$ need the advertising money. Its not like they've made it better since buying it.
 
I use an adblocker in chrome as some sites are extremely annoying to use otherwise, especially the full screen ones your forced to close or the auto playing videos.

For mobile i tend to not read much on my phone nowadays as adverts are so intrusive it makes it pretty much pointless to view them, especially as they're so either badly coded or bandwidth intensive they take an age to load so as soon as you want to click a link another element loads so you end up clicking on an advert or the text you're trying to read keeps jumping around when you scroll :(

I do find myself making mental notes of the annoying full screen/autoplay ads so i don't buy whatever their product is if i can help it.
 
I don't mind adverts to a degree. But they became so intrusive, consuming bandwidth, slowing webpages and posing a security risk that I now use an adblocker.
 
I use an adblocker, I really hate intrusive adverts.

The type I really hate the most are the ones where a site is locked to 4:3 aspect and the blank space filled with adverts, like on the OCUK homepage, I still remember when they added that change (it used to expand dynamically to fill the screen) and the backlash was so bad the mods had to nuke the complaint thread lol.
 
Adverts irritate me greatly. So much so that I no longer watch live TV on ITV. Adblock is essential for me. Facebook can be annoying as they have found ways of tricking adblockers but many are stopped.
 
mrbazmondo said:
I tend to leave chrome with a few hundred tabs open.
Click to expand...

What???! What's in them? How can you know what's in each one? Can't you just bookmark the info or find it later? Surely this can't be efficient?

I have 4 pinned tabs and maybe 1 or 2 extra at any time.

I use adblock all the time. I don't care who's ads I'm blocking. I like to browse the internet without intrusion from crap that I'm not interested in. I also always use duck duck go to avoid Google taking my usage data.
 
Its probably not, but I have 32G RAM and it saves time. They do only tend to load the content when you open the window. They're not all in the same window, split over 30 or so maybe. A different window for each thing I'm dealing with at the time.
 
I block everything. For performance, for privacy, for security, and because I just hate adverts. I don't white list anyone. I don't have any guilt.

I believe that advertising needs to end full-stop. Whether it's TV, junk mail, email spam, all of it. The entire point is to make you part with your money when you otherwise wouldn't, so it's never good for you.
 
I used to use ABP but then found that it was purposefully letting adverts through, now I use uBlock Origin and all is well, even those AdBlock detectors don't tend to work anymore :D
 
I block them with AdBlock and uBlock Origin on my PCs. Haven't blocked them on my phone but I tend to stay away from advert laden websites on it. Data is costly enough without having half of it used up with adverts of no interest.
 
What I particularly dislike about online adverts are the ones that are linked to your views; often recommending sites that you have only just broswed. It feels as though you are being stalked around the internet and this is why I have adblocker enabled on almost all of the sites that I visit.
 
I allow adverts and blocks the sites with the horrific amount of ads that interfere with using the website.

It's a shame its gone this way it used to be a great way of paying off any website bills and maybe making a bit extra. Sadly a lot of websites have gone to the "lets make even more extra" and jam packing their sites with ads and even worse the dubious ads involved in pop unders/overs.

Now it's gone to the extent of some websites using ads to be as irritating as possible to try and force people into purchasing their subscription (looking at your pcgamer completely broke mobile reading).

Almost everything is free on the internet and it's not because of altruism, people want to make money if I can use what they've posted but have to deal with a few annoying adverts so be it. As long as it's not impacting the website usage itself(or malware) I don't feel like it's a fair trade to consume their material without compensating them for it in some way.
 
I hate those websites that load in some content, you then go to click said content and then BOOM OUT OF NOWHERE an ad loads in finally and you end up visiting that ad because the DOM jumps down.

:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
 
One of the sites I used to visit - visordown, became such a hive of annoying adverts, I dropped it like a hot coal and haven't been back.
 
Not entirely ad-related, but I'm still after something that will block modal overlays. They are the scourge of Web 2.0. Just like pop-ups were back in Web 1.0.

I know for the 1st one (Pinterest), there is a script that can block it, but I'm after something that blocks all overlays.

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This pops up the very moment I've opened the web site. What good is a survey if I've not yet looked at the damn site?

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lol blank.

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BBC News "breaking"

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I use an adblocker on chrome and use Brave browser on my android phone which has built in ad blocking (to some extent) and is a nice browser in general. Web pages load up so much quicker with an adblocker and I can read and watch videos uninterrupted. Now that I am used to no ads I couldn't go back.
 
I use adblock by default, but may turn it off on some sites to support the owners - not that I click through the ads on those as a rule.

The ones that really annoy me are the new ones which open a fresh browser tab, force it to full screen and constantly bring up an alert message that makes it difficult to close the tab. Or the ones that redirect to a youtube video in the background which drowns out whatever you're actually listening to
 
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