Pop up ad on home page

[BaldricParticipant @baldric]

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 16/06/2015 09:13:40:

> proportion of Number of subscribers to Number of visitors

There are many more visitors than subscribers, and only a proportion of subscribers use the forum.

Neil,

As I use several devices I get logged out so don't bother logging back in so users like me will probably skew you figures.

Baldric

[roy entwistleParticipant @royentwistle24699]

To whoever is responsible a big thank you for seeing sense

Roy

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

Posted by Baldric on 16/06/2015 12:45:25:

Posted by Neil Wyatt on 16/06/2015 09:13:40:

> proportion of Number of subscribers to Number of visitors

There are many more visitors than subscribers, and only a proportion of subscribers use the forum.

Neil,

As I use several devices I get logged out so don't bother logging back in so users like me will probably skew you figures.

Baldric

The numbers are really, really big so it would need an unfeasibly high proportion of registered users to be using multiple machines to skew the figures enough to worry about.

Neil

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Also the number of complaining members here is such a small percentage of the actual forum membership (which I do know how many). Its just the regularly active minority that are posting their objections.

This is literally one of those cases where 99.999% or more have not been bothered by the pop up or just closed it and got on with things

J

Edited By JasonB on 16/06/2015 13:22:44

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by JasonB on 16/06/2015 13:17:53:

This is literally one of those cases where 99.999% or more …

.

Really

Edit: Oh yes, of course, they redefined the word 'literally' didn't they

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 16/06/2015 13:40:20

[Steven VineParticipant @stevenvine79904]

I saw the advert pop up a few times. I just closed it. I cannot even tell you what the advert contained. With years of Internetting under my belt, I have trained myself to automatically dismiss the trash without thought, and just read what I want to read. Ads and trash are everywhere now, you just got to learn to switch off to it, because it is not going to go away.

Steve

[John McNamaraParticipant @johnmcnamara74883]

Its a dumb pop up, I found out the hard way… when you get an email advising you of a post and click on the link it takes you to the site. If you do as I did and immediately scroll down to the bottom of the post to see the latest comment before the pop up has time to act you do not see it but the screen greys out and makes the screen inoperable, as the pop up is modal. I thought I had a virus and logged out immediately. as I said dumb…. The better ones would have followed me down the page.

I wonder how many visitors reacted the same way as me.

As far as logging in is concerned my machine will not remember me. I have to log in every time I visit so I got the pop up every time. I run Windows 7 and IE.

Regards
John

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Posted by Michael Gilligan on 16/06/2015 13:33:54:

Posted by JasonB on 16/06/2015 13:17:53:

This is literally one of those cases where 99.999% or more …

.

Really

Edit: Oh yes, of course, they redefined the word 'literally' didn't they

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 16/06/2015 13:40:20

Michael, I may not be much good at English but I can do the maths, you are indeed in the 0.001% of the forum membership that have complained.

J

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by JasonB on 16/06/2015 16:33:26:

Michael, I may not be much good at English but I can do the maths, you are indeed in the 0.001% of the forum membership that have complained.

.

Jason,

I am duly amazed

MichaelG.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Actually I should not have edited my earlier post and stuck to the 99.9% I originally wrote thats what comes with rushing to get back to work.

In which case you are 0.1% which is still a small minority

[OuBallieParticipant @ouballie]

Oh bother, I appear to have missed all the fun.

Yipee!

Geoff – Manageress to dentist later, so tip toe time afterwards

[HowiParticipant @howi]

Posted by Michael Gilligan on 16/06/2015 09:07:04:

Posted by Howard Winwood on 16/06/2015 08:52:45:

… no popups, no problems.

.

and thereore you are unlikely to appreciate the level of irritation being caused to others, less fortunate.

MichaelG.

Not so! I too have been irritated by unwanted popups. Just pointing out that there are solutions to the problem.

Popups are a fact of life as they usually generate income for the web site.

Your reply was a little abrupt in assuming the I had not been irritated by popups in the past, when I was offering a possible solution, depending on what system one used to access the forum of course.

One tries to help and get's it thrown back in ones face – silly me! 

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

Posted by Howard Winwood on 16/06/2015 17:25:00:

Your reply was a little abrupt in assuming the I had not been irritated by popups in the past, when I was offering a possible solution, depending on what system one used to access the forum of course.

One tries to help and get's it thrown back in ones face – silly me!Â

.

Sincere apologies, Howard

Absolutely no offence intended.

MichaelG.

[I.M. OUTAHEREParticipant @i-m-outahere]

Ooops pushed the wrong button there.

I was just curious as i didn't know if it was put there by admin or was a virus or something .

There is plenty of space on the homepage for advertising offers like this and pop ups could deter newcomers from returning as you never know what is lurking behind one – click the little x and download a trojan .

Ian.

[Enough!Participant @enough]

Posted by Howard Winwood on 16/06/2015 17:25:00:

Popups are a fact of life as they usually generate income for the web site.

"Pop-ups are a fact of life" is a self-fulfilling prophesy isn't it? As long as people accept them on that basis, they will be (a fact of life) and will "generate income for the website".

If, on the other hand, people reject them ….

Edited By Bandersnatch on 16/06/2015 22:34:40

[Steven GreenhoughParticipant @stevengreenhough56335]

I’m going to play Devil’s Advocate, just for a moment.

I am not a subscriber, I am a semi-regular buyer of the mags from the newsie.

Whilst I agree that these pop ups are/were annoying, I accept that I myself am ‘fair game’ for a bit of ‘assertive’ advertising being that I have gained so much from this forum over the past 12 months or so.

So even though I don’t ‘like’ the pop ups and probably won’t be moved to change my buying habits by them, I don’t really feel like I want to complain about them, per-se. Certainly, the ads arent enough to detract from the benefits I’ve experienced. Although that view may change if they became a permenant fixture.

How you sell these mags is alot like deciding what goes in them I guess, you can’t please everyone all the time…

[Frances IoMParticipant @francesiom58905]

I’m surprised that it was seen – on Firefox (well certainly on Linux can’t speak for other walled gardened O/S’s) they are blocked by default – also there are several useful extensions eg No Script, Adblocker + request policy (blocks material from sites other than original web page – eg most of the trackers etc) make web browsing much less of a gamble as to what malware you may pick up (one believable statistic is that some 40% of Windoze machines are infected with malware or similar)

[HowiParticipant @howi]

Hi michealG – apologies here too, if I was a little quick off the mark, difficult to read intent in pure text.

Bandesnatch – if you think ignoring popups will make them go away, it just isn't going to happen.

[Enough!Participant @enough]

1. People here aren't ignoring them …..

2. The term I used was "reject" not "ignore" (it seemed to me that the latter was exactly what you were suggesting). If significant numbers of people don't accept them as a "fact of life" and instead either ignore the websites that use them or become a thorn in their side because of them, they may very well stop using them.

[John HaineParticipant @johnhaine32865]

I hate adverts on TV, but I can't click on a little cross at the top right to go back to the programme. At least I understand that without the adverts we wouldn't get the programmes. Sense of proportion needed?

[Michael GilliganParticipant @michaelgilligan61133]

I think the main problem was that this particular pop-up was poorly executed, and therefore behaved differently on different browsers. Some of us suffered major irritation, others almost none. … This was clearly not the intention, and the Marketing Team very quickly did 'the right thing' and replaced the pop-up with something more appropriate [and giving, one would hope, a consistent user exeperience].

As the first complainant [on the 'what did you do today 'thread]; may I also be the one to suggest that this discussion has run its course?

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 17/06/2015 19:36:46

[Neil WyattModerator @neilwyatt]

I should have more sense than to revive this discussion, but it seems that traffic on the website increased by 5% last week!

Perhaps we should bring the pop-up back

Neil

[John McNamaraParticipant @johnmcnamara74883]

Hi Neil

I think they visit for information provided by the members…
The link below shows free files that have been downloaded from my cloud server by visitors and members.Not to mention the many that just read the pages.

**LINK**

It might be a commercial site but the interest is generated by the thousands of posters. mine is but a tiny contribution to a greater whole.

A bit of a chicken and egg situation…. ?

Regards
John

[John Stevenson 1Participant @johnstevenson1]

Whilst this was going on I, as a moderator took the time to lookup all the people who had complained against the subscribers list.

Guess what? The vast number of people who complained were not members.

So this popup was aimed at the same exact people that were complaining.

Not a 100% fail safe check as it cannot take into account over the counter sales from Smiths etc but i think we get the gist.

Trouble is nowadays we have far too much internet freedom and shared information. Can anyone remember the days where you had to fill in a reply coupon to get advise or help to prove you were entitled ?

Fortunately I feel this is a decent forum, populated by used with a shared interest but how many times do we read I'm cancelling my subscriptions / not reading the forum / going to whip the dog if you don't chance this, but they are still here months on.

[martin perman 1Participant @martinperman1]

John,

What do you mean by "a member" surely you have to register to be able to add a comment.

Martin P

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