How would you block this?

[Chris Morris]

Re: How would you block this?

Brian <usenet1@mangym utt.com.invalid-remove-this-part> writes:[color=blue]
> KublaiKhan wrote:[color=green]
> > I read somewhere that the META HTTP line is not supported by all
> > browsers. That seems to be false as far as IE or Mozilla go.[/color]
>
> It can be blocked by Opera. I read a Bugzilla entry asking for the
> ability to disable meta http forwarding. I don't know if that has
> been added as a user pref or not. But such a[/color]

IE has a very obscure security setting to turn it off, Lynx and some
other text browsers display it as a link but don't automatically
follow it, Mosaic 3 let you either turn it off entirely or just be
asked if you wanted to follow it or not.

--
Chris

[KublaiKhan]

Re: How would you block this?

Mark Parnell <webmaster@clar kecomputers.com .au> wrote in message news:<1a3vyfgn0 big0$.f639jnr13 zjc.dlg@40tude. net>...[color=blue]
> Sometime around Thu, 16 Oct 2003 02:29:01 GMT, Brian is reported to have
> stated:[color=green]
> >
> > That's one solution. There's also image blocking, user stylesheets,
> > and probably several others I'm not thinking of at the moment.[/color]
>
> The back button springs to mind. :-)[/color]

Or the X button or the power switch on your computer or unplugging
your machine from the network. All effective but don't exactly address
the issue. NYTimes carries these ads fashioned by the company behind
fpba.net. I suppose you would have the option of hitting the back
button and not reading the articles.. Thought about becoming a hermit?

[KublaiKhan]

Re: How would you block this?

Chris Morris <c.i.morris@dur ham.ac.uk> wrote in message news:<87ekxdh6w k.fsf@dinopsis. dur.ac.uk>...[color=blue]
> Brian <usenet1@mangym utt.com.invalid-remove-this-part> writes:[color=green]
> > KublaiKhan wrote:[color=darkred]
> > > I read somewhere that the META HTTP line is not supported by all
> > > browsers. That seems to be false as far as IE or Mozilla go.[/color]
> >
> > It can be blocked by Opera. I read a Bugzilla entry asking for the
> > ability to disable meta http forwarding. I don't know if that has
> > been added as a user pref or not. But such a[/color]
>
> IE has a very obscure security setting to turn it off, Lynx and some
> other text browsers display it as a link but don't automatically
> follow it, Mosaic 3 let you either turn it off entirely or just be
> asked if you wanted to follow it or not.[/color]

Thanks for the suggestion. IE does indeed have a "Meta Refresh
enable/disable choice", the default being "Enable." Disabling does the
opposite of what I'd like - it keeps the ad on and turns off the
refresh to the content page!

[Brian]

Re: How would you block this?

KublaiKhan wrote:
[color=blue][color=green]
>> http://www.fpba.net/campaigns/[/color]
>
> IE does indeed have a "Meta Refresh
> enable/disable choice", the default being "Enable." Disabling does the
> opposite of what I'd like - it keeps the ad on and turns off the
> refresh to the content page![/color]

I'm still confused. The page is a list of links. Selecting a link
shows an ad, then returns the user via http refresh to the list of
links. That, you say, is how it is supposed to work, only you don't
want to see the ad. Then why click the link? I'm not sure what
you're after, unless this is just a point of curiousity.

--
Brian
follow the directions in my address to email me

[KublaiKhan]

Re: How would you block this?

Brian:[color=blue]
>I'm still confused. The page is a list of links. Selecting a link
>shows an ad, then returns the user via http refresh to the list of
>links. That, you say, is how it is supposed to work, only you don't
>want to see the ad. Then why click the link? I'm not sure what
>you're after, unless this is just a point of curiousity.[/color]

These are just pages to show how their technology works. In actual
practice, as with NYT articles, the ad appears in mid-article, taking
up a whole page, and then dissolves into a continuing page of the
article. Disabling meta refresh will leave you stranded at the ad
page, and hitting the back button will deny you the article
continuation page. You HAVE to go thru the ad no matter what except
you can shorten the play time by hitting the skip button..
The question is, what if the skip option were not there and you still
want to read the article?

[KublaiKhan]

Re: How would you block this?

Sorry folks, I'm following up to my own post because I read the
newsgroups with "trn" and post via google. There's a huge time delay
between when something shows up in my newsreader and in google groups.
Just to clarify further, the demonstration pages follow 1 -> 2 -> 1
sequence with 1 being the Links page and 2 the ad page. In actual
practice, it's regular sequence like 1->2->3.., etc. with the ad page
being any one or more of these pages.

KK

[Mark Parnell]

Re: How would you block this?

Sometime around 16 Oct 2003 12:03:26 -0700, KublaiKhan is reported to have
stated:
[color=blue]
> Mark Parnell <webmaster@clar kecomputers.com .au> wrote in message news:<1a3vyfgn0 big0$.f639jnr13 zjc.dlg@40tude. net>...[color=green]
>> Sometime around Thu, 16 Oct 2003 02:29:01 GMT, Brian is reported to have
>> stated:[color=darkred]
>>>
>>> That's one solution. There's also image blocking, user stylesheets,
>>> and probably several others I'm not thinking of at the moment.[/color]
>>
>> The back button springs to mind. :-)[/color]
>
> Or the X button or the power switch on your computer or unplugging
> your machine from the network. All effective but don't exactly address
> the issue. NYTimes carries these ads fashioned by the company behind
> fpba.net. I suppose you would have the option of hitting the back
> button and not reading the articles.. Thought about becoming a hermit?[/color]

Then buy the paper. :-) Or read a different paper. If people stop using
their site, then they might get the message that it isn't acceptable.

But seriously, for most sites the back button would be a perfectly
acceptable option - in most cases there is another site out there that
offers the same products/information, without those ads.

--
Mark Parnell

http://www.clarkecomputers.com.au

[Jim Dabell]

Re: How would you block this?

KublaiKhan wrote:
[color=blue]
> Brian:[color=green]
>>I'm still confused. The page is a list of links. Selecting a link
>>shows an ad, then returns the user via http refresh to the list of
>>links. That, you say, is how it is supposed to work, only you don't
>>want to see the ad. Then why click the link? I'm not sure what
>>you're after, unless this is just a point of curiousity.[/color]
>
> These are just pages to show how their technology works. In actual
> practice, as with NYT articles, the ad appears in mid-article, taking
> up a whole page, and then dissolves into a continuing page of the
> article.[/color]
[snip]

In practice, this is implemented as a generic advert page, with the
subsequent page supplied as a parameter in the query-string. Any decent
proxy-rewriter (such as Proxomitron, I'd imagine) would let you rewrite
that into a direct URL to the article.

I suppose there are content-providers that expect this, and avoid this
implementation for this precise reason. In that case, rewrite the entire
page to be nothing more than a meta-refresh with a zero-second delay.

To be perfectly honest, if one of the sites I visited regularly started
advertising in this manner, I would reconsider visiting it. If the content
was truly worthwhile, I'd probably put up with the adverts on principle.
Otherwise, I'd just stop visiting it. However, I can't think of a single
website that has gone down this route that I'd consider to be worthwhile.
Generally speaking, the best content I find is given away freely.
Naturally, I doubt this will generalise to the average surfer, so YMMV. In
fact, the only content provider I've even heard of that went down this route
that people valued was salon.com, and from what I hear, they aren't doing
so well at all.

--
Jim Dabell