You are annoying me

Despite our ‘modern’ lifestyle, the law of the jungle still applies: survival of the fittest, the most noticed, the most ‘in your face’. Like you, I loathe advertising, and it pours at you from every nook these days. I was just reading today about a US Sitcom that had an episode this week based around the new iPad—paid for by Apple, of course.

People who live by selling will always be under pressure to tell you about their products. I can understand SP wanting us to know about their new books. But those ads do slow page loads, and on my screen, the content I am looking for usually starts beneath the fold, following the ad banners. :frowning:

One of my only ‘issues’ with sitepoint, and other sites in general that I frequent. And I think it’s more from a marketing standpoint…

I have purchased MANY sitepoint books over the years. Even though I have purchased book ‘X’ in the past, sometimes I still get advertisements/pop-ups for that same book…? I don’t mind the advertisements so much, but the fact that I’m being advertised a product that I already own seems like a waste of a good pop-up/banner (lol).

Maybe there would be a way to link a customers purchase record to their forum profile so they are not constantly seeing ads to products they already own.

For instance, I purchased the jQuery ninja book right after it came out. I have now been looking at the jQuery ninjas for months (it seems) all over sitepoint. I feel it just kinda numbs your visitors to the ads. Why not show me a product I don’t already own? Wouldn’t that be a better approach?

Anyways, just my $.02

I got given a hard time recently after asking how to implement an exit pop-up so I’m very interested to see how this turns out. In my view there’s a compromise between shoving Ads down people’s throats and leaving money on the table by not using marketing techiniques to drive sales.

We did the easy thing, by implement the “X” button and allowing people to remove that floating bar if they have cookies enabled. I wish magazines, TV or radio had an “X” button to remove annoying ads :slight_smile:

Doing it without cookies is a lot more complicated, but as Shayne said, we’ll look into it.

That’s what publishers are for. Well, I do have links in my forum signature, so I suppose I’m guilty of some advertising myself. :blush:

That would probably be more trouble than it’s worth. What do you think of the idea of a user setting, as mentioned above? I don’t mind if it’s on by default (and for non-logged in users). As long as I could uncheck one checkbox and stop receiving all advertisements (since they only frustrate me and I would never consider buying from those companies).

What’s most annoying (to me) is having to make efforts, no matter how small, at increasingly frequent intervals just to avoid the visual rubbish. A ‘don’t show this again’ link is fine the first time. After the umpteenth time it begins to feel rather pointless. I’d want a ‘don’t show this or anything like it ever again’ link.

Now that I’ve had to create a user style sheet for SitePoint I’ve added some more rules to hide ads that I’ve put up with before now. Since I already have the user.css. So the net effect of SitePoint’s increased advertisments has been that I see less ads.

That may have been a bit over the top, and I apologise. I do maintain, though, that marketing people work contrary to users’ best interest. I’m constantly at a collision course with the marketing people at the office (we’re a government agency, for Pete’s sake!) when they want to put obtrusive, garish banners on the site I’m responsible for.

I read your book, Shayne, and there was some advice in it that almost made me want to slap you. :slight_smile: I do realise that I’m in a small minority, though, so don’t take it personally. I still have tremendous respect for you as a person and for your professional skills.

See… now THAT’s a sales pitch! I’m going to re-read my PDF copy of Shayne’s book just to see if I can guess what made Tommy’s vein pop! :lol:

:lol: Absolutely, they want to part you from your hard earned cash!

SitePoint don’t always know what books people have bought, as they can be bought via normal bookshops (physical and online shops) as well as directly from SitePoint.

@Shayne, Hawk or Matt. I assume that vBulletin stores sessions in it’s database and I’ve noticed that guests also have sessions assigned to them. What about having adding a check to the display of that add so that if a person has an active session and they are a member then the ad doesn’t get shown, if they are a “Non-member” or “Guest” then the ad gets shown.

This is a little embryonic and I probably shouldn’t be even telling you about it, but we’re building what we call a single sign on. Basically what this will do is link purchases (within SitePoint), with your forum login, blogs login, marketplace, support tickets etc etc. This will essentially be able to control and customize most of what you see around the site, including the types of ads. It’s something that will solve the ‘don’t show me an ad for a book I own’ problem and maybe even Tommy’s larger one. But that’s a while off – so I’ll be looking for a more short term answer.

Understood Tommy – and to be honest – I’ve been called worse.

It was probably just who it came from that cut the deepest. I’m never one to shy away from these types of discussions, nor what my job is, but I’ve always found that there is a perfect middle ground discovered – without needing the name calling :). You’d probably be suprised how much I care about the users best interests, sometimes I overstep, and need an alternative perspective to bring me back in line, but it’s something I see as important. Why do you think I talk about usability and accessibility in a book all about marketing :slight_smile:

I can’t remember talking about xHTML2 and CSS3 so I’m out :wink:

It doesn’t have to be like that, that’s just the way it is. Fact is that our respective economies are kept afloat by consumer spending. If everybody stopped buying the crap that they don’t need, the whole house of cards would come crashing down. We live in a consumer based society and it’s only going to get worse.

What Shane is talking about is probably the future of advertising, has anyone seen ‘Minority report’? The only way to avoid personally targeted advertising is not to give anyone any information about yourself. Tricky.

I don’t mind seeing the advertisements for SitePoint promotions / products and for products / services from the likes of Microsoft and Adobe, etc. But the silly advertisement from 1and1 really ticks me off everytime I see it! In my personal opinion, who the hell here wants to host with 1and1? Try getting MediaTemple to advertise on SitePoint, despite being a MediaTemple customer, I’d rather see (mt) adverts than 1and1 adverts, simply because I can’t stand 1and1 and their service!

As for Tommy’s problem - Perhaps you can make it so that all SitePoint Authors don’t receive any advertisements? You know like user priviledges and so on? At least until your single-sign-on system is implemented (which I can’t wait for as I think that’ll be a great benefit to both SP and the users!).

I don’t know how this might sound / come across but I’d rather see advertisements of services / products I already own and am happy with than advertisements for services / products that I don’t want because I’m not interested in or because I’ve used them before and they just simply didn’t do the job right. I hate seeing the jQuery Novice to Ninja advert banner at the top! I don’t want that bloody book! I’m trying to learn JavaScript! But I’m sure the single-sign-on will solve this problem! :slight_smile:

Andrew Cooper

I have no trouble with ads per se. But, and that is a big one: People who design these ads do not take into consideration the style of the site, the color scheme of the site. The flashing and jumping in these raw colors gives me a headache (migraine really). I find these ads intrusive and I run from them, I never read them.

Now if the ad was customized and quiet I would take a look perhaps.

I agree with Tommy in the sense that I do not want to be bombarded every which way I turn. I am sick of it. Most sites have a lot of ads now and to find what is the content is almost impossible wading through that junk. Sitepoint has been rather restrained for a long time, but once you brake into the junk ads and keep adding more, it is not going to be pleasant to come any longer.

My issue is that the adverts don’t seem to be interlinked across sections (they must use different cookies I guess), when I jump from the forums (after clicking the don’t bug me again button) to articles, I get the same thing reappear (to which I have to close it)… not to mention that hideous lightbox which refuses to permanently croak in the HTML and CSS web references, promotion should be consistent and not obtrusive to the point of “I’m getting a shotgun”… bleugh :stuck_out_tongue:

Just thought I’d post a quick update here. I’ve asked the guys to ensure they are using the same ID for all the ads that appear in the top right. That way once you block it once – all future iterations should not appear. It’s a short term measure, but still, something we can do right away.

And yes – that does suggest a new one is coming. But it will be worth it – I promise :slight_smile: