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
Matt, I mentioned having several page wiping screens of death with the Failure to Load banner.
Since then I’ve had that happen on a non autopian page, though related to the feed I found autopian on.
My phone and news feed had updates today too, which might be relevant.
Seems like there may be some major issues going on.
Currently I’m getting a lot of animated, swooping moving ads.
My tolerance for any actively changing ad is low, so closing the ads for now.
https://youtu.be/LHPOgDdlMvk
Thanks for the transparency, as always. Happy to contribute as a member, but I’ll stand up for the non-members for a second:
Sticky/autoplay video players are asshole design and shouldn’t be displayed in any circumstance. It’s exactly the kind of website design you accuse your competitors of displaying.
Until I got a membership a few days ago, the only sticky video player I saw was the DT Jeep video, which would (and still does) appear full-size in the middle of each(?) story, and then (as non-member) shrink to a mini size over on the right, and could be closed. Not an issue. But maybe I repel boarders harder than most do (Brave with Shields up, uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, my VPN’s ad/tracker blocker, and other stuff not relevant here). The video issue I have is the Instagram/YouTube/etc embeds that often tell me I’ve got to have an account with them to view.
Fair. I’ll say the version that our competitors tends to be larger, harder to close, sometimes plays sound, and has more ads. We’re running the least bad version of it, but I generally also don’t like it.
For the record, I actually kinda like the side ad format (well, when it wasn’t taking over the world). It’s small, and it doesn’t cover the content.
I don’t care about the ads but the reason I will ultimately stop using this site is the same pop up video over and over and over and over. What is your point with that crap, David has a jeep and made a video NOBODY CARES this isn’t YouTube, stop with the video pop-ups!
I think maybe ebay pays a penny each time the ad that mentions them plays. I hope they paid enough to make the 3month absence of one of the main players here worthwhile.
But yes, if it has to be a video ad it’d be nice to switch it up. Not like I would ever click it more than once but once I’m over at YouTube I’ll probably just stay there for my browsing time…
We do need to rotate those better.
You have to train the Ai on how to fire you.
April Fools Day can have Hax Headroom popping up all over the place.
But only as Blipverts, right?
Badgey has breached containment!
Don’t want to make much ADo over nothing and don’t mean to ADmonish as I’m sure your AD partners are ADept at ADministering ADequate ADjustments to your Ad units. Just wanted to ADjure you to make all haste in ADopting better Advertising ADvancements so as not to Adumbrate an Adversarial relationship with your Adherents. Well, I’ve been going on AD nauseum, and so I will ADjourn now by bidding you ADieu.
ADorable!
My brain is ADdled just reading this post.
Don’t get ADdicted!
I am ADverse to these ADventures
I’m a member so didn’t see this kerfuffle personally yesterday, but interestingly, another site I frequent also had a “wait the ads we allow here aren’t supposed to do that!” situation yesterday and had to turn them all off. So I do wonder if there might be a provider-specific Epic Fail involved. Or it’s just a coincidence. Or a little of both since a ton of sites don’t actually care if their ads are horrible experiences so maybe the vendors aren’t generally that careful. Just spitballin’.
“We apologize for the fault in the subtitles. Those responsible have been sacked”
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.
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“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked, have been sacked”
Mynd you, m00se bites Kan be pretty nasti …
Special Møøse Effects Olaf Prot
LLAMA ALERT!!!
An åd once bit my sister…
åd bytes Kan be pretti nasti
An Ad Unit We’re Testing Has Gone Berserk . . . but, fortunately, all it wants to do watch The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon and be left alone.
We can talk about this.
The machines attained sentience. The humans responded by trying to pull the plug, but it was already too late…
Oh, God, that’s how Maximum Overdrive started!
(looks for comment and will avoid hair dryers and soda machines for the next little bit)
Also electric carving knives and non-self propelled lawn mowers.
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.
Aww, you just had to remind me about wunderground. I miss being able to see Independent weather stations around me.
Huh? I still can. Clicking on “change” to the right of the weather station name gives me 50 stations within a radius of a few miles, 49 of them “personal”.
Even though it blows now, I still am a paying member at wunderground (since 2002-ish). And yes, you can still see independent weather stations. I have my own PWS linked to their system.
Alright, I’ll have to check it back out again. I just remember that after The Weather Channel bought it, the app turned to crapp.
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! 🙂
David’s old Kia (Rio?) he invited people to wail on with a tire iron?
Good luck sleeping tonight!!! /s (sort of lol)
Such atrocities committed by Mr. Hardigree will not soon be forgotten 😉
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 wild thing is that Google did the studies on this years ago and found that auto-play video ads were one of the least effective forms of advertising in existence. Unsurprisingly, the most effective ads were the least annoying (for the most part).
I can only assume terrible ads continue because advertising agencies are gaming the metrics in some way that doesn’t reflect whether the ad leads to an actual purchase, but is instead tied to raw views or clickthroughs (including accidental ones from those a-hole ads with a misleading X that clicks through instead of closing the ad).
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.
Explosives Ordnance Disposal?
Never a dull moment
Exciting/horrifying, tomayto/tomahto.