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[Necro] Black Friday/Uploading Ads Update
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Post by
KodiackOfThrall
Unfortunately the issue is tied to your first sentence - it's so common not because most sites think it's the best solution/business practice, but because this is a widespread issue across many sites reliant on ad-providers, who know they can push the envelope when it comes to serving ads because sites need them for money. People use Wowhead in a way that is different from some non-gaming sites (eg a newspaper may have bad ads, but you're not keeping an article open for 5 hours during an intense boss fight) so we're trying to look into some options I detailed in the post, like changing the layout to have less overall ads or ones that refresh less on the pages people are likely to keep open for hours (eg raid guides).
In my opinion, Wowhead/ZAM should either completely stop advertisements from auto-cycling, or should switch to lightweight ads that do not waste a ridiculous amount of bandwidth and system resources. I've typed up a bit of an argument against your current ad-cycling system here:
http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20752326947?page=10#post-187
Auto-refreshing ads introduce a significant sum of problems, and the magnitude of said problems is only amplified when more Wowhead tabs are opened.
I seriously cannot believe how intensive the auto-cycling advertisements are. There have been several reports of latency and/or framerate recovering to normal after closing Wowhead, and after the extra testing I have done, I no longer believe that those reports are necessarily exaggerated. Wowhead can easily tie up two CPU cores on my i7-6800K while it reloads advertisements in only one tab, and heavy advertisements can effortlessly push bandwidth up to a few Mbps for several seconds.
Heck, I'm still frustrated that I had that Elder Scrolls Online ad start blaring sound while a flatmate came over to talk to me as I was testing. I had to mute the darned thing to hear what he was saying! :(
Wowhead's advertisements are painfully intrusive right now, and I will continue to recommend uBlock Origin until they are under control. Between consuming resources, automatically playing sound, and potentially trying to serve up unsavoury content, browsing Wowhead without an ad blocker is a truly unpleasant experience.
Numbers do seem to be moving in the right direction, though, and I must give credit for that. Hope to see some continued effort there! When/if Wowhead gets its ads cleaned up, and once they've been cleaned up for 3+ months, I will consider becoming a Wowhead patron. I support several other sites and content creators already, and I'd love to add Wowhead to that list if the site can prove to respect its users' privacy, security, and system resources.
Post by
Interest
We don't really know all the details yet (maybe Battle.net balance gift cards if you're above a certain amount?) but we'll be reading the various suggestions to see how to handle the finer points of it. We just liked the idea of showing thanks for good comments.
It is a nice idea either way; was just curious about how far along the idea was. Battle.net balance gift cards are a fairly decent alternative for those who basically have permanent Patron status. Also, are forum posts included in the idea? Forum posts might be a bit more numerous, but it wouldn't hurt to have some incentive to post insightfully on the forums even if it's not for money-related gains (so maybe no giving out Patron for forum posts but something a little more minor) since it has the potential to bring in new blood or more helpful posts.
Post by
Sas148
To further improve performance on database pages we've removed the automatically loading mini-3D model. If you wish to see the model please click the 'View in 3D' button as you would have previously. We're continuing to discuss improvements to the site and will keep you apprised of any major changes as they're made. Thank you!
Post by
SaltyKnife
i'm using add block from now on...
i dont care about your excuses...
Post by
likwidd
Thanks for the work towards improving this guys, it's appreciated :)
Post by
sauerlandcowboy
This post was originally made on the mega-Reddit thread
First of all: wowhead is my favorite ressource when it comes to "digging deeper" into WoW. Thanks for the great work!
When it comes to publishing information, you should never gate a gated community. Some of us use Twitter, some may use Facebook, some may not even consider Reddit unless Google tells them to do so. But we have one in common: we all visit wowhead, so please publish "important" information >> here << and then on 3rd party social media tools.
"Why did the Devs not see...?"
Well Probably because they themselves use AdBlocker (or they have an ad-free account for testing), because it is a pain to work with an Ad crowded site.
I am in the lucky position not to have to watch my volume of up- and download and I am on an internetaccess fast enough to handle vast traffic. But: I am also aware of many people around the world, even in my closer neighborhood not having broadband access. In fact, I'd still say, that there are more people with low bandwidth or volume- based data rates than other. When designing a site, one should always keep in mind, that it still should be usable for someone who is arrested with a 64k ISDN line. Bandwidth is not an unending ressource, it is like Oxygen, clear water, Oil or Coal: sometime there is no more.
I am aware of being Ads a valuable ressource for refinancing a service like WoWhead. I am aware that a service like this one can't be run without some support. I am not totally against Ads, as long as the service stays usable. Being around in the Intarwebz since the late 1990's I have seen a huge increase in Ads, not simply by size (15" Monitor vs. 17" Ads - find the content), but by the factor of "Annoingness". It pops up, blinks, scrolls whatever, it distracts and nags. So keep this stuff away from me, make "better" Advertisements! Some Sites have grown pretty well with the non-intrusive stuff. In the long run, "you" have to take responsibility for the Ads shown on your site one way or the other.
What is it all about? Well, wowhead - the site best viewed with adblockers. Man, I miss the times when sites told you "Best viewed in Netscape Navigator"
;)
Post by
FlayOnDarkIron
This post is mostly to show off my shiny new icon, but seriously, thanks for all that you do. Wowhead has been an integral part of my life for approaching +10 years at this point, almost a solid third of my entire life.
I figured I could give up a measly $9. I spend more than that on lunch. Things sometimes go wrong, its understandable. I don't believe any of this was malicious, and I think thats a point a lot of people are either missing, or choosing to ignore. Everyone loves to kick a person or company when their down, not sure why. human nature, maybe? Wowhead as a site has to sustain itself somehow, and ads are how that's done at this point of the internets evolution.
There are a lot of holier than thou people coming storming out of the woodworks and its unfortunate. All of it.
Maybe I don't feel affected by all this despite nearly daily usage with dozens of tabs open all the time, because I don't have potato internet with data caps and even if an ad was theoretically using 20Mbps worth of bandwidth and uploading gigs a day, it simply wouldn't be noticeable to me. I have never had an issue with ads on the site serving me malware. I'm not noticing any fps drops or massive CPU usage, even though I only have a i5-3570k. Maybe I'm in the minority with my experiences?
Also, Panser is entitled to her opinion, and what she says in her capacity as a private unaffiliated individual doesn't affect my opinion of Wowhead in the slightest. That said, it would be cool if you could get her on the staff, I'm sure it has already been discussed, but +1 approval from me if it happened. It would be a travesty if something were to happen with her current relationship with Wowhead because of some unreasonably angry people.
Idk, can I just recommend that people get better internet?
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/5835216788
166Mbps down / 266Mbps up
(not sure why my downloads are on the low side at the moment, might need to give Comcast a call)
Post by
DarkAviator
The video ads with full sound and autoplay were really bad, but what finally got me to block ads here was the ads that redirected your page to some sex ad page - it didn't open in a new tab or page, it redirected to the page. Happened here, happened on mmo-champion. After nothing changing on that front for a few weeks despite trying to alert people to the issue, I went to blocking ads, which I never did before in 20+ years of browsing the internet.
Post by
perculia
This post was originally made on the mega-Reddit thread
First of all: wowhead is my favorite ressource when it comes to "digging deeper" into WoW. Thanks for the great work!
When it comes to publishing information, you should never gate a gated community. Some of us use Twitter, some may use Facebook, some may not even consider Reddit unless Google tells them to do so. But we have one in common: we all visit wowhead, so please publish "important" information >> here << and then on 3rd party social media tools.
I really can't win here :( This was in response to someone accusing me of posting here and not on more visible places. We've made posts on Reddit, Battle.net, and here now, they've all gotten buried to different degrees.
Post by
Erorus
You've seen lots of blue text in these threads recently from our site director and support staff. Allow me to offer a bit of technical perspective.
TL;DR:
Despite precautions, unplanned interaction between new CDN optimizations and our ad network caused upload issues, not obvious to us until the holiday. We've rolled back that change, will fix that issue, and will improve ad behavior in general in near future.
This has been ongoing for more than the last few days. Looking at my custom filters, we're going back to at least 11/19/2016 which is over a week.
...
I guess we go back to my original question of, how was this missed if you truly care about the quality and content of the site?
Over the past few weeks, we've been moving Wowhead (and other ZAM sites) to a new CDN for improved performance. To verify that the switch is not harmful, we rolled it out slowly to a small but increasing percentage of users over that period of time. We were in frequent contact with our CDN provider to measure user experience differences before and after the switch. We did encounter some snags in the process, where we rolled back the CDN, made changes with our provider, then continued the rollout.
Meanwhile, we at Wowhead would get an occasional user reporting bandwidth issues when using our site. After double-checking performance on our end, I had concluded the issue must be with some bad ad or something else out of our control. Our other sites' teams did not report or observe any such issues on their end. On Wowhead, there are always new bugs reported and fixed, new features going live and code being refactored, that over this period of months I didn't think of the connection between this CDN rollout and the performance issues only a few people reported at the time.
Unfortunately, as it turns out, there was an unplanned interaction between our ad network at Wowhead and our CDN's optimizations once the pages reached the users' browsers. It wasn't apparent immediately, it only occured as a page (or, more common, multiple tabs) sat loaded over time. Wowhead's ad layout is different (read: older) than our other sites, with more ads, and with ad refreshing not set up for our users' usage patterns. Perculia mentioned this bit in the original post in this thread.
As the holiday approached, we wanted to get the CDN fully active for all our users to handle the holiday load. We hadn't spent a lot of time at full capacity. This created some ripe conditions for the issue to become widespread just as the staff was away from the site.
Once it became obvious there was an issue, and when we had a good hunch it was the new CDN, we rolled back to our original configuration. Meanwhile, we start to get a flood of other users reporting "it's been like this for weeks!" and it's the first we've heard of it. I don't blame anyone for that, it's normal not to report performance issues to websites right away, thinking it would get fixed. But all of a sudden we were getting lots of reports of past issues that we had no idea about.
Where we stand right now is back on the new CDN, but with the page optimizations disabled. We've discussed the issue with our CDN provider and they understand the problem (both the technical bits and how it's very serious) and have plans to fix things on their end so it plays nicer with our ad network. Wowhead's a bit of an odd website for them, our usage pattern is quite unlike most other websites. Once they have a fix in place, again we'll increase the usage of that optimization slowly, and watch closely for any problems, both internally and externally.
We also discussed ways to update Wowhead's ad layout to be a bit more like Lolking's. This should reduce the number of ad slots on most pages, and reduce how they auto-refresh. We're also looking into auto-refreshing the entire page on a long cooldown (maybe every 20 or 30 minutes). This will help the browser keep its memory and CPU footprint low. Of course, as part of that, we'll look again at improving browser caching methods, so you don't end up downloading a lot of data with every refresh.
I do want to apologize for the performance issues some users have been getting. It's certainly not our intent. We just want to help you enjoy WoW, and since that costs us money to do, we need to show ads. We don't want those ads to suck. We don't want your browser to bog down, we don't want your game to lag out. That's not what we're here for. If the ads bother you, we offer the option of premium, but that shouldn't be a requirement to visit this site. We'll do everything we can to make your visits here pleasant, even when the technology or the ads or whatever gets in our way. We'll do our best to figure it out. :) And thanks to those of you who are patient with us when things don't go right. We appreciate your encouragement.
Post by
borealis
Why not just stop serving video ads? Nobody likes them, and it just encourages people to keep using adblocking. You've got to be reaching some kind of point where the number of people blocking them entirely is outweighing the increased per-ad revenue for the videos...
That said, I get your position. You're employees and get to be involved in the game industry as part of a fairly major and influential component, and you're going to defend crappy corporate decisions to keep that job. Just stop acting like everyone else is somehow ripping you off for resorting to adblocking when you crank the ads up to 11, or that we should just be more understanding or something.
Lower the number of ads, and get rid of the video ads (or limit them to certain specific pages). And if that's not good enough to stay in business, then it just means your business model needs to change. End of story.
Post by
dhead0000
I do want to apologize.
And there it is. Finally. An apology. It's about time.
Of course it's filled with a lot of excuses, so I'm a bit skeptical as to the sincerity, but at least it's an apology. Better than the obnoxious and defensive blather that Percullia spewed.
I will continue to get the information I need from Wowhead. I will not subscribe. I used to accept the ads as part of the reality of using a free service. But because of your irresponsible (at best) or malicious (at worst) behavior, I will now install an ad-blocker and will actively choose to boycott products whose ads slip through.
Post by
Rilgon
Idk, can I just recommend that people get better internet?
I mean, you can. But given that 30% of the US has no access to broadband internet of any kind, multiple providers have started implementing bandwidth caps/fees for overages, completely glosses over people using Wowhead on their mobile devices, and doesn't even begin to touch the can of worms that is broadband internet in non-US countries, well...
There are a lot of holier than thou people coming storming out of the woodworks
Methinks you doth protest too much.
(This also completely overlooks the computing resources, the malware distribution that has been happening for
years
, etc.)
Post by
syth
As long as you accept ads from third parties you will continue to be a danger to your users.
Post by
tooltip
And show some integrity and post this on the frontpage. Don't 'hide' it in some forum where the vast majority will never see it.
Don't hold your breath—you'll asphyxiate first.
edited because i realized an em dash was better than a semi-colon.
Post by
1727384
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
SylvanElf
Thanks Perc,
We know you guys strive to bring us the best experience possible. WH is amazing, and will ALWAYS be my go-to source!
Post by
somtaaw
Overall, willing to tentatively accept this apology, and I'm going to slowly start ramping up my usage of wowhead after finding out there was a large increase in hostile ads and reading about it from Blizzard.
However, I will point out, that wowhead should have a more diverse staff, so a single holiday, doesn't put you guys into another situation where there is "nothing that can be done until staff come back from holidays". If this had happened around Christmas, we could have been going approximately 2 weeks before someone could have resolved these issues. And 2 weeks of being forced to use other websites, with what few publicity types you have (like TradeChat) being mouthy, would have made many people leave wowhead permanently.
And speaking of which, it would be great if wowhead could publically acknowledge whether or not TradeChat is indeed a part of the wowhead team which makes her an official mouthpiece. Or that she is NOT truly associated with wowhead, in which case she needs to stop pretending that she does when it suits her. Especially since she told people to &*!@ off, and the moment people called her on being the wowhead video manager, she backpedalled and said she doesn't work for you
Edit: I feel I should actually point out, I mostly like Panser's videos, they're usually insightful and full of information I probably wouldn't have known. But if she pretends to be working for or with a company, then she becomes a public face of that company. Her attitude was terrible, and it needs to be made clear.... does she represent wowhead officially?
Post by
Sas148
We appreciate that you're willing to tentatively accept the apology.
Please let me clarify though that action
was
taken during the holiday weekend. The main problem, with respect to the upload/bandwidth usage, was
resolved on Saturday
when we switched our CDN to a backup until such a time as we could investigate the underlying cause. Issues with the increasing numbers of bad ads were handled continuously the entire holiday by disabling ad networks as we could determine which ones were responsible. That's not even covering the number of internal communications made during the weekend by at least a half dozen people and the time and effort Perculia, Erorus and I made in trying to update/follow numerous threads in multiple locations to keep our community apprised of our efforts.
In respect to TradeChat let me reiterate that she is not employed by Wowhead or ZAM. She is an independent contractor who has her own business. The "video manager" title is a voluntary title that is reserved for non-employees similar to moderator, screenshot manager, editor or localizer. Her twitter account has other examples of this like "St. Jude Ambassador" or "Lootcrate Influencer", neither of which is meant to indicate employment. Discussing anything further about our relationship with an independent contractor would not be appropriate here in the forums. With that in mind, please know that we've received and acknowledged your feedback on the matter and will take any action, privately, that we deem appropriate.
We look forward to continuing to improve the site performance for our community in the near future. Thank you.(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##Sas148##DELIM##
Post by
1467059
In respect to TradeChat let me reiterate that she is not employed by Wowhead or ZAM. She is an independent contractor who has her own business. The "video manager" title is a voluntary title that is reserved for non-employees similar to moderator, screenshot manager, editor or localizer. Her twitter account has other examples of this like "St. Jude Ambassador" or "Lootcrate Influencer", neither of which is meant to indicate employment. Discussing anything further about our relationship with an independent contractor would not be appropriate here in the forums. With that in mind, please know that we've received and acknowledged your feedback on the matter and will take any action, privately, that we deem appropriate.
Keep saying that all you like, fact remains that she has a more than important effect on your site's reputation.
On a related note, where do I request account deletetion?(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##Sas148##DELIM##You can email with account deletion requests. Thank you.
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