Please Turn off the Flashing Ads

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I know that this site helps pay the bills by running ads. But the ads I have been seeing lately are intolerable. That Bourne Identity one is flashing in a very irritating, way, and even the one for diabetes moves or flashes at first. I can't take it much longer - I might as well go hang out in the food court of a crowded mall.

I use Ad Blocker Plus for firefox... it's a lightweight addon and I haven't seen an Ad in a while.

Anything available for IE? I don't like Firefox.

i do not see flashing ads

Not sure, but maybe; might want to check download.com though, they would have that sort of thing.

I haven't seen anything of the sort at all.

I have no idea why people think advertising with flickering ads is going to make people look at them more.
Sure, they will be noticed, but I don't think anyone would want to try and read what the ad says as of the flickering . Instead, it will avert their eyes onto something more "stable". Atleast thats how it is for me.

Yeah, it's like this, both for TV ads and metaphorically for Banner Ads:

"COME BUY OUR STUFF!! ! BUY IT NOW!! ! NOW IS THE TIME!! ! NOW NOW NOW!! !"
"No, you're being to forward!" *runs away*

flashing ads are also a major legal/safety risk... i am epileptic, luckily not a photosensitive epilepsy type... otherwise if this website started making me have seizures alex would have a nice big fat lawsuit in his inbox.... good idea to change to non flashing ads to make sure that if photosensitive epileptics DO visit the site that no one starts having seizures from visiting the website.

For Windows users who are not afraid of tweaking their system a little, there is the trick about editing the hosts file (usually located at something like C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc): Suppose you figure out that certain ads are hosted at an adserver called www.adspewingverminfromhell.com. Open the file named hosts (the filename doesn't have an extension) using the Notepad program, then edit the contents to add a line at the end, saying
127.0.0.1 www.adspewingverminfromhell.com
Save it, close your webbrowser and start it up again, and you'll never be bothered by ads coming from *that* server again.

What this does is that whenever any program on your computer (e.g. your webbrowser) tries to connect to, in this example www.adspewingverminfromhell.com, it gets redirected to a computer with the IP address 127.0.0.1; a.k.a. your own machine. And since you probably don't have the pesky animated .gif or flash file on your own system, you get a box of white space (and perhaps a message saying that the "page", meaning: the ad, could not be found) instead of any ads from the adserver(s) mentioned in the hosts file.

Since there are many adservers with different domain names, it takes a period of investigating whatever ads "slip through the filter", to determine the domain names to be added to the hosts file as described above. After doing this for some time, I've seen steadly fewer ads, and today I only see ads whenever an adserver is rigged up under a new domain name.

The drawback to this is that when I've clicked "into" a page with lots of ads that have been eliminated this way, I need to click the "back" button several times (once for the page itself, plus once for each "killed" ad) to go back to the previous page.

If it's a .gif ad, you can press the Esc key on your keyboard to stop them temporarily.
If you want to re-animate the ad (not that you'd really want to, I suppose) you can just refresh the page.

LOL... I mentioned how distracting and annoying those ads are about 9 months ago. I guess I should have started a thread on it. But I realize this site has to keep on somehow.

Thanks all for the great tips on disarming them

(and lol w/ KBABZ... agreed)

The flashing ads only bother me slightly.
I have thought about the effect they likely have on others here, though.
I was wondering if anyone would mention it.

Yeah, actually I don't see any either, now that you mention it.