It appears that the tornado ad is finally appearing on my blog. It's been on the other blogs for a couple days now and is now on mine. I know it's annoying, but it's only going to run through Tuesday. We've received tons of complaints about it already and they've all been passed on to the management, who are not at all happy about it. But they've got a deal for the ad and can't break it until it runs out. The overwhelmingly negative reaction makes us hopeful that the powers that be will refuse to run such ads in the future. So please don't bitch about it to me at the moment. We only have to tolerate it for a few days and then I think the ads will be redone to be less obnoxious.
It doesn't bother me in least; I just hit the "close" button and it went away.
reposting my comment from Pharyngula:
I saw people complaining about this at Respectful Insolence. I didn't know what they were talking about since I use Firefox with Flashblock and Filterset G. So I opened Scienceblogs with Internet Explorer. Man. I have no idea why you guys subject yourself to such crap as ads like that. Why don't you just cut out the middleman and poke yourself with needles everytime you go to a new webpage? I can't stand moving flashing blinking crap when i'm trying to read. Using those extensions, I never have to.
Oh, is it a flash thing? I was wondering why people were complaining about what looks to me like a static picture of a tornado advertising a History Channel program.
I still don't know why people install flash at all.
The problem I have with the ad is that even when you click it closed, it prevents you from clicking on certain links or text fields on the page, as if it's still there overlaying everything. It would take a company as stupid as the History Channel (who ought to be called the Spooks and Pseudoscience Channel, quite honestly) to come up with an ad that alienates rather than attracts customers.
I have an inviolable policy never to patronize any company that slaps an ad right in the fscking middle of a page I'm trying to read.
ruidh:
Flash is fine if you want to watch little Flash movies and animations on a website (like the hilarious Odd Todd). It's when ad designers throw it in whether you like it or not that's the pisser.
mw66:
They're working on the problem with it screwing up the links. This is the first time they've tried any kind of ad other than a basic text ad, so there are bugs to work out. All indications are that after this deal runs out, they won't be accepting any more ads like that. We've gotten an extraordinary number of complaints and they're all going right to the people in charge. The tech folks are working hard on it. So please give us some time to get things fixed. I don't think this will be a continuing problem.
Then again, the page is free.
I read the feed in bloglines. I had to click through to the site itself, so I could see the ad for myself. It is pretty lame.
Sorry, doesn't bother me in the least. I hate the ads that vibrate. The swirling tornado thing is almost graceful.
But if you need another negative vote tell them to get rid of the freekin' ad or I'll let the air out of their tires.
Always happy to be a help.
Flash ads you have to close are annoying, but not nearly as annoying as ads that rapidly flicker colors.
Every time I think I've seen the most annoying thing ever to hit cyberspace, something tops it. Right now, that something is the tornado ad.
I've been going out of my way to avoid whatever it's selling, so that I won't be tempted to encourage whoever it was that designed that ad. Actually, whatever it's selling doesn't seem very obvious, which IMO is a good thing.
Sorry that SB people have to put up with it, Ed; I promise not to let it get in my way of reading ScienceBlogs!
On a related note, the Vonage ad unfairly stereotypes four-fingered nerds.
As I mentioned to PZ, what tornado?
As simple as can be, the outrageous behavior of advertisers across the internet has made anyone that's comfortable enough configuring software use adblocking.
In principle, I absolutely wouldn't mind letting advertisers reach me on webpages like they do in magazines. But the fact that ads always have movement, even if they're not tornados, has driven me to declare war on them and remove them from my surfing experience.
I've had the same problem with the damn thing. In addition, comments over at Afarensis are screwed up for me, again. So I have two words for Seed Magazine, Word and Press.
WordPress is free, and you can find people willing to help you get it installed if you have any trouble. Better yet, it doesn't have Movable Type's annoying problems.
And the plug-ins are much better.