Sup’s Sporadic Spewage of Syllables

You know the things. Those folds that pop up on corners of pages just begging for them to give them a touch so they’ll fill your screen with some ad you didn’t really care about. And even if you don’t, you’ll probably hit them by accident anyways given they’re usually on the top-right corner, where window controls are located above. And like all annoying things, it’s suddenly everywhere.

So I decided to look into this and find out there’s not just one site providing this but tons of them, all equally terrible sites in their own right. Not just that but they’re all charging money for it, for something that probably some hobbyist coded in their free time and it’s spread like wild fire. And people are actually buying it. What are you, idiots?!?

In theory, this might sound like a good idea. It’s just sitting there, on the corner of your screen, not bugging anyone. That’s wrong. The fold is designed so that it’s always there moving, swaying with the wind, begging for you to kill your curiosity and check it out. It’s annoying, it’s distracting and it doesn’t go away.

Not only that, the whole thing seems to be made out of a bizarre combination of Flash and Javascript, which I’m sure is right up there with monkey ads on Never Do This Ever What Were You Even Thinking. Not to mention the bulk it adds to the page, or that every different implementation has different bugs like not preloading the ad, not handling the hover properly, stupidly huge hit area, and that people can make ads as cumbersome and intrusive as they want.

In the end, I don’t care how clever you are, an ad is an ad and I’m going to get rid of it any way I can and dislike your site that much more for it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 14th, 2008 at 11:01 pm and is filed under Computers and their Contraptions, Interwebs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.