Why are the forum Buttons being pulled from an AD server?
 

My pop up blocking program also blocks lots of ads and I can never see the buttons at dvdtalk.com to post messages and things unless I close it down. Why the heck are the buttons for New Message, register, faq, etc being pulled from ads.kleinman.com and not from the dvdtalk forums server?

It's really a pain in the ass.

I have Norton Personal Firewall and for some reason it has pulled away all the DVDtalk buttons

I think this question answers itself. Think about it.

If your reasoning that the question answers itself is that they want to force peopel to have to look at ads, that's a really bad answer. DVDTalk gets paid the money for the ads whether or not my PC shows them to me or not. I'm not ever going to click one and if I have to make PC changes every time I want to post something here, I'll probably just go find somewhere else to post.

I would hope that a website as big and great as DVDTalk wouldn't purposefully force their users to have to be presented with tons of pointless, annoying, and intrusive ads. But I guess that's their choice.

I'm just looking for an answer one way or the other.

Ad-blocking software is against forum rules.

http://www.dvdtalk.com/legal.html

Ah well. See ya.

Oh no! Please don't leave. Your contributions to this forum have been so valuable.

OK. I'll stay just for you.

Yay!

<3

Nice work Groucho! You may have prevented us from losing another "Dalvin." :)

I am sure Geoff could answer more directly than I, but I think the idea is that the ad server functions as a image server, and the buttons are images. The main server is optimized for the database and loading. The ad server is optimized for serving images. And a lot of the effort behind the scenes is to balance the server loads to handle the huge amounts of bandwidth and processing required for the forum.

That is my guess.

I'm pretty sure klemvor was right in his assumption that the reason the forum images are on the ad server is to inconvenience those blocking the ad server. As posted by Copenhagen, you cannot block the ads on the site, so there should be no problem for anyone - unless you are breaking the rules.

Here it is from the horses mouth:

The images for the forum come from ads.kleinman.com in equal parts:

- To load balance. When we had them come from the same server that was serving the php pages it really dogged the system
- Ads is optimized to serve images and ads so they should load faster from there
- People who block ads (which they've basically agreed NOT to do in the member agreement) have a more difficult time using the forum

Join the Premium Service coming soon and keep your buttons :)

Geoff feel free to use that great slogan when you launch the Dvdtalk Premium Service ;)

I'm sure it's wrong and naughty and all that but who the heck reads the "Terms of Agreement" when they sign up for something. I don't know that I've ever read one so I wouldn't have had any way of knowing about the ad server thing.

But as long as DVDTalk doesn't put in any ads with Pop Ups or with Sound, that's fine.

I think it's pretty funny when a forum adds a requirement that ad-blocking be turned off in order to remain a member. I guess the people who run some websites forget that people visit other websites also and it's just absurd to think that everybody will go through the hassle of turning ads on & off just to visit DVDtalk.

Hopefully some software will come out soon that will allow people to selectively allow images to be loaded from certain servers while blocking them from others.

And really, "tons" of "intrusive" ads? Maybe I've just gotten used to it all, but I can think of the one pop-under that loads when you first visit the forums, banner ads at the top of each page, and then certain temporary "ad initiatives" like the current LOTR:TTT one and are usually posted about in here. How many others are there? Freedom is not free... and neither is bandwidth. :) He's gotta pay for it somehow.

So far, this new google toolbar seems to be doing just that pretty well.

I use AdsGone and it lets me do that. It has a huge list of servers that it doesn't allow ads from but if you do have to (like here), then you can select that server and put it in the "allow" list.

Just a quick note to say that, while you started off quoting me, the "tons" of "intrusive" ads comment was actually from kelemvor. I have found DVDtalk to be totally within reason when it comes to ads (the stray misleading spam ad nonwithstanding).

Ahh I see you've figured it out...heh :p

Yep, I know. I was feeling a little lazy and didn't want to go quote, copy, paste, and edit. :)

Yup - just click the button when you want to allow pop-ups for a site and it does it. I don't see the need to block ads altogether, but then again, I'm a website publisher myself and rely on the income from them to pay for my servers.