OSNews

So when there's no OSNews because you've made it financially un-viable, then where are you going to post your smarmy comment?

Well I also blocked pretty much everything too, not to defeat all adverts but to defeat really bad adverts that JUMP, FLASH, or generally insult my intelligence.

Some of these ads come from companies I actually respect, (Micron, Intel, IBM etc) but their ad managers still feel the need to shout at me or talk at me like I was an idiot.

Now adds that are passive, color bland, but otherwise interesting would likely be left alone but most advertisers feel the need to get in your face, too bad.

If these advertisers could get some sense of feed back for how much pain they can get away with before getting blanked, they might learn to tone it down and not get blocked.

We know that in the future ads are going to become more and more subversive and hidden in nature. I would personally prefer a banner ad, over a group of stealth gorilla advertisers posting in the forums, sneaking in product bias everywhere they can.

Although in the case of the OSNews community, I think we'd be surprised to find that all OSNews users are actually gorilla advertisers unaware that everybody else is too

gorilla = large ape
geurrilla = an irregular armed force that fights a stronger force by sabotage and harassment

Yes, because the ad revenue lost by one person admitting he's blocking ads is going to tank the company.

I'm not sure where you went to high school, but I'd head off to the local community college and take some simple economics classes if I were you. Basic arithmetic might also come in handy.

Edit: Yes, I know you were being sarcastic. For the humor-challenged, so am I.

Edited 2007-07-28 16:21

Here's a question for the OSNews-crew: What percentage of users are blocking adverts?

That would be an interesting statistic. I know that I do, but it's not directed specifically at OSNews ads; I use all the standard filters for adblock (atdmt etc) which affects pretty much any news site I visit.

Might be easier to ask the users!

I block adverts because:
1, I wouldn't click them anyway.
2, It wastes my bandwidth.
3, It gives them details about how I use the net.
4, I don't care about 3,
5, but I do about 2.

Is it right to block? I can't answer that.

(I had an OSNews subscription for a year or two, so feel no guilt)

This may come as a surprise to you, but once upon a time, folks used to actually pay for their hosting. No slimy ads all over pages or anything. If you wanted a web site you paid to have it, or you put a subdomain on a public server somewhere. If OSnews can't exist without putting this trash all over their pages then they need to move off to a public server or shut it down. I have three sites that have been up for over 6 years and not one ad anywhere on any of them. That's right, I wanted a web site so I got a f'ing job and paid for it. I didn't rely on random ads exploiting my users to keep my sites online.

Err, we pay for our hosting too. Why do you think we need ads in teh first place? To pay for the company Aston Martin each of us has?

The ads are in place to pay for our hosting. Did you really think we would pay this out of our own pockets? Anyway, stuff sometimes goes wrong, even on websites like OSNews and Reddit. We are not gods, you know. At least we're open and honest about it.

David has just emailed us that the issue is most likely fixed at the moment. If not, please let us know.

How much does OSNews pay for hosting ?

OSNews and the associated websites (like gnomefiles, osgalaxy, and many more) use multiple dedicated servers in a dual homed data center. That's not exactly a $9.99/mo hosting package.

Right, because Eugenia and Thom not only have to work for free, but they have to pay for bandwith out of their own pockets. A site like OS News wouldn't last 5 minutes on a free host without exceeding bandwith limits. Moreover, if your sites had the hits that OS News gets, you'd be getting ads too, or charging for subscriptions.

As far as ads are concerned, I use adblock but don't actually use Filterset.g or other lists like that that pretty much block everything remotely resembling an ad. I "train" my filter over time so that the most annoying stuff gets killed, but more benign, nonintrusive ads remain. It works pretty well. Browsing on Linux also helps with Trojans and stuff.

Right, because Eugenia and Thom not only have to work for free, but they have to pay for bandwith out of their own pockets.

David Adams himself implies bandwidth & server costs are taken care of by the revenue and even that part of the revenue is put aside for other things related to OSNews:
"Revenues from our advertising efforts go to our rather substantial monthly dedicated server rental, bandwidth, and system maintenance costs, as well as providing a budget for covering OSNews' staff expenses, including the occasional new laptop, various important gadgets and other office supplies, and travel to the occasional tradeshow or event, and every once in a while, travel costs of meeting with each other in person."
Ofcourse it is possible the teams still pay for OSNews' bandwidth out of their own pockets, but unless they come forward stating so, I see little evidence to support your claim.

If I'm not clicking on the comments anyway, I guess it's just a waste of real espace.

That said, I don't make use of such ad-blocking sw, ads don't bother me this much... unless they take over the whole website, of course!

If you want to dedicate your life fighting the add. Just so you can save what...

Time? Not really when ever a new add breaks threw your blocker you have to tell it to block that add. normally the adds (5 years ago adds usually hindered the loading of pages because they usually were bogged down severely) take 1/100 second to load it will take you probably on the average of 10 seconds to properly block that add perhaps 30 if you need to add it to your host file.... So in that time you blocked the add it would take about 1000-3000 adds from that one source to justify blocking the adds.

Inconvenience? On respected sites the worse they usually get is a title add, one add in the story and perhaps an add or 2 in the side bar. Granted that is a lot of adds but it is no means a hinderance (perhaps a mild irritation) from reading the information.

What really really need more then an add blocker but some way to determine the trust of an add. Just seeing an add on the internet doesn't do it for most people because they don't know if they could trust it.... If you have a real product at a good rate and you are trying to sell it on the internet it will only work if you have some good word of mouth advertising. Or you need to have an already well known name brand, for online advertising to work. So if we could find a way to have an online registry of the different companies adds and block or accept the ones that are from reputable companies with good marks that won't end up spamming you scamming you or just sell a POS product that hardly does what it says (Well at lest that will block the Vista Adds!).
I am sure my way will have a lot less of a fight back then just the add blockers because most of the adds are from somewhat reputable companies (at least the big ones) the Add providing companies would probably be happier because and work with the software because they want to be trusted and get more revenue. The ones who will loose out are the jerks who are abusing the capitalistic system and trying to scam the public and make a buck no matter how.

"ad"-vertisement

Just so you can save what... Time? Inconvenience?

Many web sites (in general, not OSNews in particular) have GIF and FLASH advertisements that are constantly moving. Their goal is to get your attention--and they do.

The problem is that this motion is extremely annoying. I would rather breath cigarette smoke. We go to the web site to read the article and we are greeted with "Look at me!", "Look at me!" off to the side.

As for time, some websites have intellitxt or kontera ads, which place double underlines under random words. The problem with these is that you have a double delay in loading the page, and the second delay is independent of your ISP's pipe speed.

But on the bright side, OSNews is very kind to put a PriceGrabber panel of to the left side. I think that's supposed to be an ad, but it's awfully convenient, so I usually go there first when I want to buy something.

Intellitxt/kontera? My day was going quite well until you gave me indigestion with the mere mention of those two, thanks a lot!

I absolutely HATE Kontera and Intellitext with every ounce of my soul, because they have turned "getting in the way" into an artform. I'd almost rather deal with the annoying flash ads in the sidebar of the web page.

Edited 2007-07-29 02:36

Intellitxt and kontera are no longer any problem for me:
http://jackson.io/forums.html#double

"Time? Not really when ever a new add breaks threw your blocker you have to tell it to block that add."

Nope:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1136

Just tell it to download in the background and never think about ads again. It really makes it alot easier to read websites without "hit the monkey" banners surrounding everything.

Personally, I didn't start blocking ads until I started running into web sites with 2-3 popups per page, ads that jumped/flashed/made noise, and ads that covered the actual content itself. I'm sorry, but many people simply won't stand for that sh*t, myself included.

In cases where the Adds are viral or annoying with sounds and popups is understandable. But some people will go on a quest to remove all adds from the websites they visit just so they can feel "Pure" from commercial influence. OS News is really good at stopping those type of adds from infesting its site. I remember I had a sound add in OSNews that played automatically and I complained about it and I have never heard of one again.

Ad blocking *does* save time, I think I established my set of AdBlock rules over a week as i browsed. Hell about 15 rules will wipe out 90% of ads. The hit count on */ads/* is over 20,000 here. and */adserver/* has about 10,000.

No if you want to get my attention then be creative with your ad uri's. TV ads have to try and beckon attention in various ways. These guys aren't even trying.

Heheh... I don't know what you're talking about.

...or if you bother to subscribe like some of us have.

I use adblock, *and* I subscribe.

I don't agree with Eugenia on many of her viewpoints, but I support what OSNews does as a website. This is one of very few websites that I visit every single day.

The amount they're asking for support is less than some people spend on dinner for *one* person in a single night!

The staff doesn't make money from this website; what little revenue they get basically helps them break even on the cost of running it.

Edited 2007-07-29 00:19 UTC

Wow... I'm not the person who typed that 100 "Kb" hosts file, but seriously... is the only thing you can do, checking capitalization? :|

Seriously, that kind of "correction" is just disgusting. And I thought my teachers were bad, who were above me and yet had no idea WTF a kilobyte or megabyte was. :|

Edited 2007-07-29 10:25

proper captalication off units is just as important as proper Grammar, Speling, and Punctation if you don't do it properly you're point gets lost and nobody noes what your tryin to say

knows...nobody knows.

If you're going to correct someone, make sure you don't screw up like they might have.

Trying to lecture someone while using "you're" when you mean "your".
Very ugly...

Y'know, 100Kelvinbit sounds way cooler..

just turned off adblock - osnews has ads! Never knew....

ads? fvck your ads, why should I enable adverts when I'm vulnerable to script injection? Adblocker stays on!

I dont actually ever click ads when I see them out of principal so you'd not make any money from me. I believe that if a product is worth using you shouldn't need to spend that much on advertising for people to hear about it and when I want to buy something I go do a little reading.

The argument about OSnews going away, maybe that's a good thing? no offence to OSnews, but the internet has went seriously down hill in the last 10 years spurred by venture capitalists thinking they can turn what was fertile educational roots into another television.

The majority of sites, before they are bought out are worked on by people who care, who actually like doing what they are doing because of that and not because they can make a quick buck. Once we run out of decent free as in beer websites THEN we can talk about a subscription model. With that in mind, I'm going to maybe donate some money to OSnews for the times I've surfed their site but in general I hope that advert based websites die a very quick painful death.

Just for the information, the same problem appeared on reddit.com recently.

The problem might come from... Google. We can't really tell for sure though, but it would explain the same problem occuring on Reddit, a website completely unrelated to ours. Ads is mostly David's business, and he's working on it best he can .

Problem is Google or some other company who provides ads. This same problem happened also in local newspaper site (hijacked Firefox window and showed Drivecleaner ad). Really pisses me off that Google, or whatever the ad company is, doesn't seem to have any control checks on stuff they put up. I have nothing against using ads in site but atleast they should make sure they aren't spreading viruses, worms or hijackers.

Yes, this nasty ad shows up on Firefox/Linux, too.
The main browser window minimizes and a dialog pops up (Ok/Cancel). After clicking any button a page opens in the OSNews tab. After leaving this page (entering osnews.com in address line) another dialog pops up - only after confirming that you can go to the real osnews page.

Edited 2007-07-28 12:37

It doesn't happen on Konqueror, but I do get an annoying popup asking me if I want to open some bogus text file. Digg does the same crap, I have to constantly hit cancel so these scum bags don't get my share of hits.

Ditto. I have no problem with advertising except when it gets in my face, then I feel more than inclined and entitled to block it--if the advertising is in-your-face, I'm not going to click it on it regardless.

Sadly, that's the case with some of the advertising programs OSNews uses, so their most of ads are automatically in my hosts file. It's not an OSNews problem; it's a problem with their advertisers promiscuously accepting bad ads. If they'd clean up their act, I'd gladly remove them from my hosts file.

I still see the HiMobile and Pure Mobile 'verts on the left side, but they don't bother me at all. They're unobtrusive, have a small filesize, and aren't Flash. I'd actually be inclined to click on those if they struck my fancy.

Modern business is based on contempt for customers. Name me an example where that isn't the case?

"Netscape (Machintosh) detects a possible vulnerability that may send your private information using the integrated Windows Mail client."

LOL

Hehh, I don't think I want to know anything about a site which has "drivecleaner" in its name Anyway, the address was already in my adblock, which means sometime in the past I've already run into them...

i went to that site and it reported 456 cookies


i didn't know it could read my cookies.txt file that is linked to /dev/null



LOL

Interesting! Safari in Private Mode detects 456 for me too!

Seriously, what does it take to get a post deleted? I can understand leaving the many troll-posts and allowing the community to knock them down with mod points, but when a post has a link to a malicious site, doesn't that warrant special consideration? By leaving it standing, aren't you helping google direct users there?

I can appreciate the integrity of not moderating posts on subjective consideration, but isn't there a line that could be drawn?

Malicious site ? Check the domain name in the url: this was not trolling.
It's one of the actual pages you would end up on instead of OSNews because of the "problem". The link was just kindly disabled with a warning...

2. Decent providers don't load the ads until after the page is fully loaded (We call it polite download)

Unfortunately, most providers are not decent and this is exactly why I installed Adblock two months ago. The ads never bothered me.* I simply got tired of staring at a blank page while my browser was "Waiting for adserver.whatever.com..."

*) With the exception of that buzzing mosquito flash ad

Here's some decent providers:

1. EyeWonder
2. EyeBlaster (most ads at least)

Here's some so-so providers (at least if you're not running Linux or if the ad isn't an expanding banner):

3. Pointroll
4. DART Motif (formally known as Klipmart, now a subsidiary of DoubleClick)
5. Atlas Rich Media (part of Aquantive)

"8. BTW, blocking ads is really bad. Even then, the rich media vendor's don't serve their ads off */ad/* anymore, so ya."

My computer, my decision, my rules.
Is it ok to change channels on the TV when the commercials come on? Is it ok to go the bathrooom at that time?

10-15% of the CPU when not interacting?! That's outrageous. Even 1-2% is too much for me. 10% warrants an immediate ad block.

So when a website serves up ads that make my browser slow down or otherwise annoy the living fornication out of me, aren't they "charging" me more for viewing the site than other advertisers? How is that fair, or right?

Others might see a different non-annoying ad while I'm subjected to the annoyware version, so we are effictively "paying" different "prices" to view the same content.

If sites need to resort to pissing their users off in order to satiate their advertisers then the pendulum has already swung too far in the direction of the advertisers and website owners who recieve kickbacks for subjecting us to annoying drivvel surrounded by mock window facades and flashing backgrounds.

Yes, some websites charge more then others. Just like when you purchase an iPod with 40GB its likely to be cheaper then one that has 80GB. They clearly think their site is more valuable, and you don't have to pay the higher price (more CPU time, space, annoyance), just don't buy their product (visit their website) anymore, at least until they cut costs (make advertisements less annoying).