Thread 16 - TalkLair: "Well, I'm not exactly quaking in my stylish-yet-affordable boots, but there's definitely something unnatural going on here."

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 15).

Another year over, a new one just begun...

In the TalkLair, the hearth is glowing, the walls festooned with tinsel, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors, the tree is twinkling with fairy lights (and possibly being clambered on by cats). The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch though, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics.

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey Christmas roast beast over there in the corner of the cave…

I am on Chrome and use AdBlock as an adblocker. However, I have paused it on Mumsnet. I just ignore the ads.

That was exactly what I had ... then Chrome fell over by petulantly refusing to update, while incessantly nagging me to do so, so I abandoned it in favour of Firefox. I couldn't find a way of pausing AdBlock for Mumsnet only, so I have harrumphed and switched to an ad-blocker that doesn't work in Chrome ... possibly because Chrome is a Google product and ads are all? Anyway, so far so good, but vamos a ver, as the Catalans say despite it being Spanish!

Life was so much easier when MrG would just roll his eyes and fix small Linux-y problems. Now the shoe is on the other foot ... except that he's not asking calmly and I'm looking for work-arounds rather than actually knowing how to fix stuff. But neither of us has used Microsoft for about 20 years.

I've always been on Chrome, and I've never suffered from the problems I've seen reported by other people. Bloody IT; it's weird!

I've also had no problems with Chrome... so far!

I suspect that Chrome just had a bit of a tantrum and if I reinstall it from scratch - which would take all of 5 minutes, if that - it would be fine!

Don't you DARE quit MN!

If it takes him or you a week, sort it!

I'm getting an annoying 'disable you ad blocker' pop up, as of this afternoon. It has a go away button (mostly - when not, it goes away with a page refresh). It's happening every 3 or 4 pages but is- so far - less annoying than actual ads, which render the site virtually unusable on a mobile.

I don't intend to vanish entirely, but it's not encouraging me to linger.

I don’t use an ad blocker at the moment. I know I used to and can’t remember why I stopped. Mumsnet mostly seems to offer me Toast ads which I scroll past without really noticing. I buy quite a bit from Toast but so far nothing as a result of seeing an ad.

I get ads on MN on my phone but they’re literally a small rectangle that goes away as I scroll down.

In principle I don't object to ads on websites that I enjoy the free use of. They have to fund themselves somehow; running a big site like this costs moolah.

The big irony (which I see has not been resolved, according to the very angry thread in Site Stuff) is that I only installed an ad blocker in the first place, years ago, because of MN's ridiculous out-of-control giant ads that took over the whole screen and slowed my laptop down and made it get really hot and froze the screen and sometimes I had to kill Safari/reboot the laptop

I have disabled my ad blocker on MN for now. But I will certainly be adding to the chorus of "How about you fix your fucking ads?" on that thread.

Exactly - it was Mumsnet that made me install an ad blocker. Grazing¹, autoplay, memory use, speed, overheating, data use and some being just so big it's not physically possible to scroll past on a phone because they fill the whole screen and touching them.to scroll just clicks through to the ad instead. I gather there have also been some offensive ones.

Ordinary ads, I don't mind.

¹ I haven't a clue what this word was meant to be - autocorrect got to it and it looks like nothing I meant to type. It might have been buffering.

I just get them interspersed between posts. I'm not on the app.

The messaging from MNHQ on this has been really, really poor, especially considering that the actual content of the site is user-generated. They really need some decent communications planning and delivery. I think referring to adblocker users as "freeloaders" was a particularly low and telling point.

And the latest cooing about how they consider carefully what ads they'll accept, etc etc, is disingenuous to say the least - the pop-ups and animations are appallingly intrusive and distracting, and there are ads for all sorts of dodgy crap like obscure cryptocurrencies.

Whether this is a big cosmic coincidence I have no idea, but when I turned on my laptop this morning, it informed me that Chrome was turning off my ad-blocker because it no longer supports it. Which is annoying, cos in my experience it has worked well across across many sites, (including MN) without any problems. So now I have ads.

Unsurprisingly, reddit is all over this. With 80% of posters saying, just change to Firefox. Which I really don't want to do.

@duc748 ... uBlockOrigin? It's been known for a while they were going to do that. because Google! I'd recommend installing the Firefox browser.

<on edit> ... cross post! We've both had Firefox installed by default for years because we use Ubuntu. No problems I'm aware of.

I don't need to uninstall Google, though, do I? I imagine it would be easier to have them side-by-side, because of password manager and so on. I shan't be rushing to action, anyway.

@duc748 ... No, absolutely not. MrG is running both Chrome and Firefox, as did I until my version of Chrome had a tantrum and refused to update. But you can export bookmarks/passwords from one to the other. This doesn't remove them from the original browser, just provides files to import into the new one.

Thanks, Gonners!

The app is utterly pointless, as far as I can see.

I use the ordinary mobile site, but some ads are so big they fill the whole screen - they are technically 'between posts', but no non-ad area is visible so scrolling fails. If I don't hit the ad at sufficient speed to get past it on pure momentum I have to close the tab and come back in.

I don't browse the web much on my mobe (cos I am old-fashioned enough to believe that that's what laptops are for!), but I can't recall any great issues on MN, I can just scroll past ads, I think. I don't think I've ever had to do what Bint describes.

I'm often reading Mumsnet on the app on my iPad and I haven't come across the giant ads people are mentioning, just the small rectangular ones I can scroll past.

I have narrow gaps at the sides of the ads and if they stick, I scroll there. The back button can be of use, too.

I’m mostly using Safari on my phone and can scroll past the ads easily and they’re not especially visually distracting on here so I’m not bothered by them.

I used to be on firefox years ago but I've been chrome for far longer than I was firefox and - touch wood - don't have issues with it. Neither, thankfully, do I get stupid big ads on MN although I do get them in some other places. I would seriously suggest that nobody go to any of the Reach PLC newspapers because they're ads make it almost impossible to read articles which completely defeats the object of having bloody adverts in the first place. If they'e so invasive that they put people off then you've utterly buggered yourself.

I don't mind ads if I'm on a free site then I expect them as "payment" for me using the site. I do expect them to be as unobtrusive as possible. I don't expect invisibility but I'm happy with the ones that appear over to the right of my screen and the ones that I see as I scroll down. The scrolling down ones are immovable so cause me no issues, they sort of take up the space of a post and that's fine by me. The ones to the side change but they're all adverts to sites that I've shopped from or spent time looking at stuff on. Sometimes I even go to the site advertising and by something!

Ultimately, if we don't have ads then we have to pay subs eventually because sites like these don't run on fresh air. People having issues with big intrustive adverts should absolutely complain and MN should do something about it.