Whilst I totally appreciate the need for advertising revenue in order to support the GWM site, can I just say that the 'talking' ads are INCREDIBLY irritating, as they render silent browsing impossible unless you mute your 'puter before opening any pages?
EDIT: And sometimes you actually get TWO competing talking ads jabbering across each other ... unbelievably irritating. I hereby pledge never to use any product advertised by a GWM talking ad.
Seriously, Chainer ... these ads radically interfere with enjoyment of the site ... and are seriously counter-productive.
Seriously. This is some of the most annoying and intrusive crap I've ever seen. "NO JOKE - YOU'RE THE 100,000th VISITOR!!" And the freakin' thing has to SCREAM it at me??
Chainer -- if you MUST have these damn things on each and every picture page, can you at least arrange it so there's only ONE AT A TIME? Not TWO cross-jabbering commercials?
I've been a frequent and happy visitor to GWM almost since it was inaugurated -- but if the babble continues I'll (VERY RELUCTANTLY) have to say buh-bye.
It seems that now, I need to wait before viewing a picture to see what sort of ad appears and shut it off. Yes, the talking ads are still present. And if one lingers too long on a picture after shutting off a "talkie," another talking ad appears.
I'm not complaining as I understand the need to raise funds in order to keep this a free site. But it's almost worth the $10 per month for Lou Krivda's site or Her Biceps at $11.95 to avoid the ad hassle.
Unfortunately, the Chief is right ... much as I love this site, I'm checking in less frequently ... and whenever the talky ads start jabbering across each other, I leave.
GWM is completely unusable to me in Firefox now because I can't stay on any pages for more than a couple of seconds before I get redirected to crackle.com. And my browser is telling me it's preventing up to 6 pop-ups on each page just before I get redirected. Something is haywire. Have any of you found a cause and solution for this? I now have to use Safari, which I don't normally ever open, to view GWM.
I'm getting the Crackle dot com forwarding also. And after temporarily disappearing for a little while, the pop up ads are back with a vengeance, worse than they were before. Each click sometimes giving me three pop ups. I don't get these anywhere else.
It's a shame there's no practical way to engineer a simple 'mute' on the talky ads while leaving the silent ones in place. As I've said before, I TOTALLY understand the need to have ads in order to subsidise a free-at-the-point-of-delivery site like this ... and it's only the talky ones which are actively annoying and distracting.
I disabled ads. I'll GLADLY re-enable them if you can get rid of the crackle.com redirects (still doing it as of 8/28) and obtrusive talking ads! Cheers!
Here's another glitch in your ad system. I just returned to the site after being away for several days. I had 8 notifications. As I visited each picture and returned to the notification page, I ended up with about 45 of your ads automatically downloading themselves to my download file during the entire review process. A real pain to delete them all. What gives?
I just tried the home page again; clicked on just one picture; and the polls page. I got 7 more ads downloaded automatically; all of them coded HTML 72890-ad.html; with a number sequence 2 through 7 for six of them. I've been on line since 1997 through three different Mac computers and have never had this happen with any site except now GwM. ????
EDIT: And sometimes you actually get TWO competing talking ads jabbering across each other ... unbelievably irritating. I hereby pledge never to use any product advertised by a GWM talking ad.
Seriously, Chainer ... these ads radically interfere with enjoyment of the site ... and are seriously counter-productive.