Adverts on the forum website

[RogerS]

Or you can be devious and add all the ad servers to your hosts file, redirecting them back to the localhost. This also speeds up browsing because the ad panel never loads!

Now if you're talking to someone with some sort of computer literacy, fine. I have absolutely no idea what a server, a host file or the localhost is.

localhost.....come on, Phil. He's your pub landlord

 

[RogerS]

Or you can be devious and add all the ad servers to your hosts file, redirecting them back to the localhost. This also speeds up browsing because the ad panel never loads!

Paul, where does one find the URL of the adservers to start with?

If anyone wants to do this on a Mac then this link is useful http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/edit-hosts-file-mac-os-x/

 

[MartinCox]

Now that's an IT question I do know the answer to. I'm pretty sure a Mac comes in different sizes because my favourite is the Big Mac.

 

[JakeS]

While I understand about AdBlocker and use it in general, I do think we ought to have a thought about how the site is financed and treat it as an exception, from time to time at least. If we do click through to the ads occasionally, advertisers will keep buying space and we will be able to carry on using the site for free, the way we like it. The ads are not very intrusive and can even be interesting, imo.

(As other users have suggested, I frequently just see ads from sites I've visited recently, or things I've searched for recently. So "interesting" is a curious way of putting it; generally I see things that interested me at some point in the past but since I already know about those things, I don't find them interesting again and again. I presume the intent is to just remind me constantly that if I want product X I can definitely get it from supplier Y, supplier Y is the place to get product X, supplier Y is your friend, etc.)

I don't use AdBlock as a matter of course because I generally don't need to, and I do appreciate that advertising provides important revenue for a lot of web sites. However, I think the point that Jacob's making has a lot of merit as well. Advertisers continue to push and push larger and larger amounts of content in their ads, which uses up regular user's data allowances at a dramatic rate, costing the regular user money. They continue to put 'functionality' into their ads - and often those client-side scripts are either not very well written or rely on plugins like Flash which are not very well written, and this dramatically increases the load on the regular user's computer, which slows everything down for them and can eventually lead to component failure, costing the user money.

When we see ads on TV, they're broadcast in the same manner as regular programming, and aside from the notorious volume increase, they do nothing adverse. Ads on the Internet will actually cost the regular user money, we are essentially paying for the dubious privilege of seeing them. Quite frequently this will be more money than the site owner is actually getting in compensation for running them! On my phone I recently noticed that about 70% of the data I've used in the last month was used by Twitter, of all things. Twitter messages are ridiculously short and I don't look at it that often, so it's not simply an issue of over-use... it's because Twitter embeds video ads in amongst actual data, and these videos play automatically, using up my data allowance. If this had tipped me over my allowance and into the bit where my provider starts charging by the megabyte and I had an extra few hundred quid on my bill, I would be absolutely furious with Twitter. I wouldn't be thinking "it's reasonable that they run adverts to support their service", I would be thinking "these scumbags stole several hundred quid from me, and Twitter helped them do it: screw them and their service". There's no way they got paid anywhere near that kind of money for running the ad.

Thankfully Twitter have finally added an option to not auto-play videos, so we'll see how that goes - but the general point stands: it also behoves the owners of websites to ensure that the advertising they get paid for doesn't place an unreasonable strain on the end-user's computer, internet connection or wallet. UKW doesn't make my PC slow down, and I'm happy to leave the ads running, but my PC is reasonably new and pretty good. In the course of my work I get to see the kind of PCs a lot of regular users have, and a lot of people have computers that struggle with even simple Javascript, let alone Flash. Some of those people simply accept that the web is full of slow, unusable sites and struggle through them anyway; others just give up on the ones that have too many adverts.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

As someone once said - if you're using the internet and you're not buying, you're being sold.

 

[Sheffield Tony]

The adverts certainly do make a difference; static ads I could tolerate, but animated/video ones are a waste of bandwidth and distracting.
Adblock is on for everything for me. I know about Axminster already anyway :lol:

Hosting a forum really needn't be all that expensive. It can even be free, and free from ads for logged in members.

 

[Phil Pascoe]

What about moving avatars on this forum? How much do they use - not much, I presume? - but they (different ones) can be there for hours. I confess I've got them switched off as they irritate me.

 

[AndyT]

I think that's a really sensible and well argued post from JakeS which makes me glad I've not bothered with Twitter and confirms Jacob's experience.

 

[JakeS]

What about moving avatars on this forum? How much do they use - not much, I presume? - but they (different ones) can be there for hours. I confess I've got them switched off as they irritate me.

If they irritate you then by all means switch them off! But moving avatars - like animated smilies and so on - will be downloaded to your computer once as a single "animated GIF" file, and stored in your browser's local cache, so that next time your browser loads a document such as a forum page that references that particular avatar, it doesn't bother going to the Internet for it at all - it just loads the one you downloaded the last time you saw the page. It'll take up a little bit of hard drive space, but most avatar files and smilies will be inconsequentially small. For example, the "hammering" emoticon used on this forum is 770 bytes large, which is ~0.0000007 gigabytes. It's so small, in fact, that my computer allocates about five times as much space to store it as necessary, because the filesystem only deals in chunks of space 4 kilobytes in size (~0.000004 gigabytes).

Adverts, on the other hand, will generally get downloaded every time - partly because the same advert provider wants to make sure that you're looking at the adverts they're being paid to run now and not the ones you saved from three weeks ago, but also partly because they need you to actually re-download them in order to count it as a 'view' of that advert in order to properly charge the people who advertise things. If you just load the cached one you downloaded then they can't tell that you've seen it, so they can't charge Volkswagen or Axminster or whoever actually placed the ad.





(And yes, Twitter is awful in more than one way!)

 

[RogerS]

Jake, you make some very good points. The one thing that I'm not sure I agree on is your phrase ' which slows everything down for them and can eventually lead to component failure'. Simply using the computer for what it's intended for isn't going to cause component failure the more you use the computer. True, a badly designed computer in terms of getting rid of excessive heat will make for a very unhappy computer. But a well-designed computer is quite happily churning away, day in, day out.

One question...where do you find out which sites have used how much of your bandwidth? Have you got some sort of monitoring utility or does your ISP tell you this?

 

[RogerS]

I would award the Bandwidth-Waster-of-the-Year Award jointly to Amazon and eBay. The amount of extraneous crud that they shove down the line. No, I couldn't give a toss that someone else bought this or that. Or that 'You might like.....'.

 

[Jacob]

I've just installed AdBlock on my old lap-top. It's like having a new computer. Wish I'd known about it sooner.

 

[JakeS]

Jake, you make some very good points. The one thing that I'm not sure I agree on is your phrase ' which slows everything down for them and can eventually lead to component failure'. Simply using the computer for what it's intended for isn't going to cause component failure the more you use the computer.

This is true for the hypothetical 'perfect' computer and it may be mostly true for some power-users' self-built computers, but in most cases modern commercial PCs are built to a budget, and in particular the cooling systems are absolutely not designed to run under heavy load for very long at all.

Most likely scenario: if the CPU is sat at 100% for a protracted period because of some shoddily-coded Flash plugin or runaway JS script, the CPU fan (and if you have it, case fan) is going to spin up to full speed, and the longer or faster the fan runs, the more dust it pulls into the machine, and thus the more likely it is to fail. This failure sometimes comes in the form of a fan failure (I've seen one CPU fan die because it got tangled up with hair drawn in through the case) and sometimes comes in the form of PSU failure (one of my own PCs has died in the past because of dust that built up in the power supply and eventually caught fire and shorted itself!).

Obviously this happens over time anyway, but if the CPU is placed under load and the fans speed up, it happens faster. Higher fan speeds can pick up dust from further away from the case and draw more material into the case, for example. And this doesn't even consider that most PC fans are pretty cheap affairs and the longer and faster the fan runs, the more likely the motor will fail... and without adequate cooling, some CPUs/chipsets/etc. will throttle right the way down and barely function until temperatures drop, and others will simply die.

One question...where do you find out which sites have used how much of your bandwidth? Have you got some sort of monitoring utility or does your ISP tell you this?

On my [Android] phone, I go into Settings -> Networks -> Mobile Data, and it lists the apps (rather than sites) which use the data connection the most. Since I turned off the auto-play on videos, Twitter has basically stopped consuming notable amounts of data and been overtaken by other things on the list - my phone tracks these things on a monthly-data-allowance basis, so the chart is cleared once a month.

On a computer you'd have to install monitoring software to get a full picture - I don't believe Windows or OSX come with an easy network usage monitor, and interpreting the results can be a job in itself sometimes!

You can get a broad idea by opening the developer tools (usually F12) in your browser, switching to the 'Network' tab and then loading the page you're interested in (sometimes you have to tell it to start monitoring first; it depends on the browser). It'll track all the different requests made and tell you how long they took to return the document, how big it was, and so on. For example, if I load the front page of the UKW forums, the top ten downloaded items are:

- The page itself: 51kb
- Advertising content/script: 32kb
- Facebook 'like' script: 16kb
- Advertising script: 14kb
- Advertising content/script: 12kb
- Advertising content/script: 10kb
- Advertising content/script: 9kb
- Advertising content: 7.5kb
- Advertising script: 2kb
- Advertising content/script: 2kb

The total download for the whole page is 160kb; only the page itself was new content for me, from a quick scan down the list the page images all came out of my cache and therefore weren't included in that 160kb... so basically when I load a page on UKW I download twice as much advertising as content, Facebook notwithstanding.

(As I said before, I don't care that much about the adverts - if it helps the site out, it's fine by me. But given that a significant number of those items were bits of Javascript to run things like the fancy Amazon-product-carousel adverts, I can easily understand why someone with a less powerful computer than mine might find their browser slowing down dramatically!)

 

[RogerS]

Thanks, Jake. I'll check that out.

Mmmm....computers designed down to a price? I'm delighted to say that my iMac doesn't fall into that category and certainly doesn't overheat

 

[Droogs]

I think you'll find your iMAC is built down to a price just as every piece of equipment made in the industiralised world is. and that price is a hell of a lot cheaper than you would ever believe, I from workiong inside the industry for over 20 years.

 

[KevM]

I've used either Adblock or Adblock Plus since they first appeared for Chrome (ABP now have an Android browser, but it was a bit laggy for me), I've recently been using the Ghostery add on for Chrome and their dedicated browser for Android - the Ghostery Android browser transformed this (UK Workshop) site from unusably slow to instant loading.

It does take a tiny bit of effort to find the configuration settings, I've disabled all of the various trackers etc. and haven't noticed any negatives. Occasionally reviews and comments on sites will be blocked, but they're replaced with a little blue ghost that you can click to run elements once, or always on a given page.

https://www.ghostery.com/en/try-us/download-add-on/ - available for most of the major browsers, Android and iOS devices.

 

[bugbear]

I hope all the "clever" people with ad blocking software will be happy when UKW has no income and is closed down. :roll:

BugBear

 

[RogerS]

I think you'll find your iMAC is built down to a price just as every piece of equipment made in the industiralised world is. and that price is a hell of a lot cheaper than you would ever believe, I from workiong inside the industry for over 20 years.

Yebbut, it doesn't overheat! There's designing down to a price and then there is designing down to a price.

 

[Jacob]

I think you'll find your iMAC is built down to a price just as every piece of equipment made in the industiralised world is. and that price is a hell of a lot cheaper than you would ever believe, I from workiong inside the industry for over 20 years.

Yebbut, it doesn't overheat! There's designing down to a price and then there is designing down to a price.

Well my Macbook Pro overheats - to the extent that it gets uncomfortably hot in my lap. It's not perfect. Maybe I should stop following the Williams sisters and Jeremy Corbyn

 

[RogerS]

I think you'll find your iMAC is built down to a price just as every piece of equipment made in the industiralised world is. and that price is a hell of a lot cheaper than you would ever believe, I from workiong inside the industry for over 20 years.

Yebbut, it doesn't overheat! There's designing down to a price and then there is designing down to a price.

Well my Macbook Pro overheats - to the extent that it gets uncomfortably hot in my lap. It's not perfect. Maybe I should stop following the Williams sisters and Jeremy Corbyn

Yup..Macbooks do but not iMacs.