Here at The Autopian we strive to offer a great, ad-free experience for members, and for everyone else, a version of the site that’s a little lighter on ads than the competition. One of the ways we try to achieve this is by testing different combinations of ad units on small percentages of users to see what gets us the results we want without making the viewing experience worse.
Except for today. A unit (this time a little ad box that shows up in the lefthand side of the page) we were testing somehow developed sentience and not only jumped from a small percentage of users to seemingly everyone, it also decided to cover the whole page and now refuses to be closed. That’s my guess, anyway. It’s also possible that the ad parameters got reset trying to fix a spacing issue. Who can really say?
Our ad partner is in the process of fixing this but, for now, I’m going to turn off the display ads for all stories published today and going forward until the ad unit is removed (testing is over, it failed, clearly). Thanks for your patience!
P.S. If you enjoy this ad-free experience, you can always become a member here. Being a member also gets rid of the video sticky player.
Top photo: Volvo
Oh, God, that’s how Maximum Overdrive started!
Ahhhh, just another great benefit of being a loyal member since the beginning. Now don’t go and screw it up like wundergound.com did.
I wonder what Robert Downey Jr. has to say about that
Crazy ads still happening for me.
Berserk like Ash in Alien, or more like a robot from vintage Doctor Who or Star Trek that can be stopped by confusing it with illogic?
Really hoping the second one…
Excuse me, but I’m going to need a warning before seeing images of a crashed C30 from now on. What if my children were present? Think of the children!
As A C30 owner myself, I was aghast upon seeing that image 🙁
Look, this is serious business. I needed everyone to know how serious this is.
Please, please, next time choose a Hyundai! 🙂
Ads are fine, but can something be done to not have ads with video or animations playing in them automatically? Seriously, do advertisers, or the platforms distributing ads not realize that irritating people does not sell your brand or product? I for one, will avoid any brands that do this. It’s counter productive advertising. Like spam, just f-off. Or having your company name on a vehicle and then driving it like an ass. Why waste the time and money?
It seems as though all of the marketers currently employed seem to think that being extra annoying over and over and over again sells things.
Newsflash: it doesn’t.
Ads on mobile games seem to take the cake – an 8 second ad becomes 5 different 8-10 second ads because every time you click the ‘x’ to close it, another ad pops up.
The joys of testing thing in production environment.
Surely, not exciting as commiting on a prod DB without a transaction in a bank during EOD (IT people will understand), but still exciting
I work in IT and we do IQ/OQ/PQ testing in a dev environment without change control, promotion to QA with change control and validated testing, and finally promotion to production.
There was a “most interesting man in the world” meme with the caption “I don’t often test my code, but when I do, I do it in production” that resonated with my team.
The only thing we test in production relates to automated equipment that is not available in the lower dev and QA environments. It’s a Jurassic Park hold on to your butts moment.
That’s the right thing to do! I do not recommend testing in prod and then promoting to lower environment.
Specially if you do not backup your database often.
But it is equivalent of duct tape: you know it is not the right thing to do, but it is the only thing available.
I recall seeing something similar go around at my work, except it was the Austin Powers “I also like to live dangerously” meme where he stands on a 4 in blackjack or something.
At my research job at a university, back before the Jurassic (before continuous integration, as opposed to nightly builds) we had an exceptionally ugly Cartman hat with “I broke the build” written on it in dry erase pen. We made staff, students and faculty who broke the build where it at lunch. It was amazing how much people did not want to wear that hat, and how less often the build was broken.
Sort of like what the manglement of 24 Hours of Lemons does with having black flag violators write all over their car, or their themselves.
We have a weird issue with a major, multi-hundred-million-dollar e-commerce site where Git pushes are actually causing old code to show up, and break the site. For now, the project manager has us pushing code to prod by SFTP-ing in individual files, and the production site is now very far off from the repo code, so it’s tech debt we’re going to have to solve, and I keep pushing for that.