Annoying adverts...

[G4Z]

I wouldn't normally complain about adverts but I just had my aural senses assaulted by Whitney Houston. I was in the middle of banging out some classic house tunes as well and the result was not pleasant.

I don't wanna ABP the forums... but I will if that experience is repeated!

[Tattysnuc]

... yet not as annoying as that Haribo advert

It gives me the Heebie Jeebies every time!

[scaryjim]

Another +1 to this - just had some BT ad start singing at me unexpectedly. I really really don't mind ads to fund the forum, but I really really *DO* mind my computer playing audio at me unexpectedly. I think this one responded to a mouseover, but since I often forum whilst in bed my mouse can often drift while I'm typing, and I don't expect things to start up audio just by being moused over. I know Hexus needs to pay the bills, but surely it should be possible to do this a little less intrusively

[kopite]

... yet not as annoying as that Haribo advert

It gives me the Heebie Jeebies every time!

I hate that advert!

I would love to see a lorry plough through the whole family and cleanse the gene pool

[Betty_Swallocks]

I'm sorry but that's exactly why I use adblock. I have no objection to ads per se but so many sites use over the top intrusive adverts that do nothing to promote their product, if anything they put me off buying them.
I want to support Hexus (and other sites too) and if everyone restricted themselves to normal ads I'd uninstall Adblock but as it is I'm not prepared to be interrupted by these ones.
I don't know if it's just me but the highlighted words in articles that pop up with an advert REALLY piss me off.

[jackvdbuk]

... yet not as annoying as that Haribo advert

It gives me the Heebie Jeebies every time!

the comment on youtube:
i thought this was about tits till 0:18

[DR]

Hi Guys


Thanks for the feedback - I know the feeling.

We have a team of full time staff who run the site, and create the great content for you to read - we've designers and coders who bring the pages to you.

We want to make sure we can continue the deliver that content, and, with a recession happening companies are even more careful with their advertising spend.

We work closely with the companies who advertise to ensure they get value and they are of interest to you, our readers.

Even when we work so hard to make sure they are relevant people still moan, they block them, they even block and brag about blocking them.

This means that we then need to find other ways to ensure we can continue and look at things like Intelitxt which is the underlined advertising words. People then moaned about that - so we made a conscious decision if you sign in to the HEXUS site (MyHEXUS) you don't see them - if you sign out and aren't logged in you do. So it's a value ad for you to use your MyHEXUS login.

In regards to the mouse over ads - which make a noise, we have strict guidelines and ensure that people follow them. You need to trigger the noise. We may look to remove them from the forums in the future and just run them on the main site.

Also, all the people who claim that they block ads due to the Flash using up CPU time etc - well we now make sure around 80% of our ads are non Flash based advertising.

So all in all, we are doing our best. If you want to block them - I can't stop you. But remember they do pay for all this content and forums which you get for free

Thanks

David

[scaryjim]

Thanks for the response DR, I appreciate the effort you guys put into Hexus, and I have absolutely no issue at all with the general level of advertising on the site.

In regards to the mouse over ads - which make a noise, we have strict guidelines and ensure that people follow them. You need to trigger the noise.

Whilst this may be true, they are triggered very easily by accident - about 2 seconds of mouseover (yes, I just sat and refreshed a page until I got the relevant ad, to see what the trigger point actually was). This could easily be triggered by simply scrolling down the page and stopping to read a comment, if you're using your mousewheel (the ad doesn't care how the mouse got over it, after all ). I don't see any great advantage to a 2-second mouseover start as against a click-to-start, and the latter would be *much* harder to trigger accidentally...

Of course, the Intellitxt adverts are even more trigger-happy, immediately taking over a big chunk of screen estate and blaring noise at you if your mouse goes anywhere near them (although I appreciate that these vanish when logged into MyHexus, and of course when the new site launches this will be simplified by the single sign-in with the forums). There's been more than one occasion recently (on other sites, not Hexus - because I can log in here) where I've abandoned an article half way thorugh because it's simply too problematic to dodge all the Intellitxt ads whilst scrolling...

Still, it is nice to know that our concerns are at least read by the management, even if the final decision is that the advertising revenue warrants the occasional slight intrusion of noisy adverts