Menu's hiding behind ads

[0iD]

When I'm viewing the Hexus homepage the drop down menu's have a habit of hiding behind the ads. This happens with IE7(.0.6000.16575) & Opera 9(.24 Build 8816). No idea if this is just me or not, but it happens in both browsers.

[Funkstar]

Doesn't happen for me in IE 7

[arbitor]

Or me in FF

[nvening]

On my FF v3 beta2 the adds disappear when a drop down menu is selected.

[Fraz]

Originally Posted by nvening

On my FF v3 beta2 the adds disappear when a drop down menu is selected.

same here using SeaMonkey 1.1.7

[Nick]

It sometimes happens for a brief period when the banner ad is updated.

Let us know if it's still happening though as the page is coded for the drop down to go over the ad or for the ad to disappear when the drop down is activated.

[pauldarkside]

It does appear to be an intermittent problem when viewing the site with IE7; I've not tested with other browsers.

Sometimes the top banner advert disappears when the menu is active and reappears when inactive. Sometimes the ad comes back too soon but is at a lower depth than the menu, or reappears too soon over the menu. In either case, the advert to the left isn't affected, meaning it's always above the menu preventing me from selecting it's items.

I actually can't remember the last time I was able to use the menu successfully and as a result haven't bothered playing with it until spotting this thread.

[MD]

It depends if the flash control is trusted, i.e. the first time a new flash control is loaded IE7 requires you to click on it to acivate it then click on it to visit. From what I have found if the flash is not trusted by the user through the first click then IE7 will treat it like a background image...

Matt.

[pauldarkside]

Originally Posted by MD

It depends if the flash control is trusted, i.e. the first time a new flash control is loaded IE7 requires you to click on it to acivate it then click on it to visit. From what I have found if the flash is not trusted by the user through the first click then IE7 will treat it like a background image...

I'm not entirely sure if I've understood you correctly, so apologies if I haven't

The whole "click to activate" is related to the browser, or more specifically IE (Eolas v Microsoft, and soon to be rectified thankfully), interpreting the embed/object tags, which these ads do not appear to be using; perhaps they're using something akin to SWFObject to allow for click-through? If it were a "click to activate" issue there would also been an outline surrounding the object along with a tooltip prompting the user to active.

It just seems more like a z-indexing issue to me.

[Iain]

It's z-indexing to a certain extent. All flash movies take the highest z-index value, developers have no control over that.There is a flash parameter called wmode that can be set to transparent but a) it doesnt always work and b) it relies on the creator of the flash movie setting certain things up in the movie background and for adverts we're not the creator.

To get round the above there are two options
1) put the ads in iframes. I'm not even going to discuss how bad an idea that would be
2) put the ads in named divs and have them hide when the menu is opened

We have code in place that does number 2 but as Matt indicates we sometimes see problems with untrusted flash ads. In short, Flash is a royal pain and we've implemented the most user friendly workaround we could think of. We're always improving so we'll continue to look at it but we do more than most to try and solve the problems Flash movies bring.

[pauldarkside]

I don't think it's a trust issue as if it were, like I said before, there'd be a warning thrown by IE relating to the fact that an untrusted object was present. As that's not the case and the intended solution works in FF, it appears more an IE bug?

Looking at it closer, those two DIVs containing the ads are being controlled by showHideDiv on the first attempt, but any subsequent attempts appear to be ignored. It'd be interesting to see if it is actually the SWFs causing the problem in IE, in otherwords would it still happen if those SWFs were substituted for the GIFs used in the noscript code?

Damn, I don't envy you for one minute and certainly appreciate your efforts. Debugging browsers is a right royal pain