Re: Wowhead ads: "Please whitelist us"

Beitrag von Glom

So about a week ago shortly after the news about the advertising captchas I disabled my adblock on wowhead to support the site in the cheapest way possible.

Now when I originally installed adblock I didn't even notice a change on wowhead, since the ads were completely out of the way anyway. So I figured, yeah why not enable them?

But then today I got a big banner ad at the bottom and then a gigantic video ad about the grinch sucked up the whole top-right corner of my screen and when I clicked the close button it took like 1/2 of a second to close so I clicked close again which activated the sidebar ad underneath it which summoned an additional window in my face to buy computer hardware. (Gotta hate those layered ads.)

Needless to say I RE-enabled adblock. . .

Edited to change Add to Ad (Now just wait, when I'm in a dungeon I'm going to say 'ad inc' and everyone will laugh at me.)

Beitrag von TheOnyx

But then today I got a big banner ad at the bottom and then a gigantic video ad about the grinch sucked up the whole top-right corner of my screen and when I clicked the close button it took like 1/2 of a second to close so I clicked close again which activated the sidebar ad underneath it which summoned an additional window in my face to buy computer hardware.

We do run footer ads (the ones that scroll up from the bottom) for some of the larger ad runs. They should only appear once a day.

We do have ads that allow you to watch a video in them, but you have to click on them to see the video expanded/hear the sound. If you have an ad that's trying to expand without you mousing over it or that plays sound without you asking it to do so, it's running against our policy. Please report such ads so we can yell at our ad department. Trust us, we like yelling at them more than we like people blocking ads. :)

As for the questions about why blocking ads affects Wowhead at all, azulathel did a good job of answering this already. TL;DR: When you block an ad, it doesn't remove it after it loads. It prevents the ad from ever loading. Wowhead doesn't get credit for a 'view' in this case.

Beitrag von Slice

Beitrag von 83344

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Beitrag von Malgayne

What difference does it make if I see the adverts or not? I never click any advert on any website, so if Wowhead gets paid by clicks, they'll get 0 from me anyway, if Wowhead is paid by views, they're still loaded just not shown in my browser so either way they're paid. So where's this money coming from that I'm supposedly depriving them from?

This.
I'll gladly unblock them if this is answered.

Many advertisers pay based on views, many pay based on clicks. Some of our advertisers would be affected an some wouldn't. Moreover, though, most advertisers detect when ads are blocked, and decline to pay for them. Whitelisting our ads—even if you never click on them—does nonetheless affect our revenue, even if it's just a little bit.

Beitrag von Slice

I am seriously trying to whitelist this site. Using Firefox, adblock, noscript. I'm getting no where.

wowhead.com is "allowed" by noscript.

@@||static.wowhead.com/images/backgrounds/* is listed as an "exception" in adblock.

All I see is the plea to whitelist.

Any help would be appreciated.

Your problem is you have the sites that provide the ads blocked in NoScript - just enable all sites you see on the list when you're on a Wowhead page, and that should do it.

I just selected to allow all on this page. I'm still not seeing ads. *sigh*

Beitrag von 405756

This post was from a user who has deleted their account.

Beitrag von Slice

Yes, I reloaded the page several times.

I should probably just get premium myself. Lord knows I spend enough time here :)

Beitrag von AbsolutGrndZer0

Well, I just clicked my AdBlocker to "disable on wowhead.com" for you. :) Hopefully I won't have any problems, if I do i'll be sure to report them. :)

As for problems with ads, I agree mostly, I hate ads on pages however Wowhead IS a trusted WoW fan site, so 99% of the time you can be sure they aren't going to give you keyloggers or anything. Can it happen? Sure, anything can happen.

Beitrag von EvilChookie

In adblock plus, you'll need to add "wowhead.com" to ensure you hit all of wowheads subdomains. Don't add "www.wowhead.com" as that will only get the main site.

As an interesting aside, when I can see the ads, I click the expandy button to the right side, and the 'Please whitelist' banner is shown again, regardless of browser (like IE9, that has no adblock system in it).

Very strange.

Beitrag von Coruin

well, I have no problems with ads in general. Unfortunately Wowhead uses one of those ads, which open in a new window if you click somewhere into the background of the site. That's the only reason why Wowhead isn't whitelisted on my end :(

Any chance you can get rid of that kind of ad, wowhead? Would be much appreciated.

Beitrag von Farmbuyer

That said, I cannot tolerate ads on websites. I dislike them tremendously which is why I have AdBlock for Firefox. I never ever click on them and most of the time they are ghastly large and distracting and finding information on the website is impossible. Far too often they are either purposely or are hacked to contain viruses, malware, and keyloggers.

Pretty much THIS. In the specific case of Wowhead, I'm not worried about deliberate malware. But when I'm trying to read static text or scan down columns of icons, having a bunch of jumping, dancing, singing, strobing crap on two or three sides of the page is too annoying. Google-style text based ads would be perfectly fine (especially if they were related to my item filter at the time, how cool would that be).

My rule for anything moving is: if I didn't click a Play button someplace, it needs to not be. If I wanted it to dance around, I would have told it to dance around. Looping Flash ads, animated gifs, all that stuff goes right into the bin without a single regret about who is or isn't getting paid. Static images sitting quietly and unobtrusively off to the side? Fine, well behaved, go on. Invasive eyesores one step away from inducing a seizure? Those advertisers need to f*ck off and die, the whole world would be improved by their absence. Privoxy filtering keeps me sane.

However, I am fond of Wowhead and fully understand how much work it must take to run a website such as this. I will therefore become a Premium member and keep AdBlock working. I'd rather pay money up front than experience ads.

I would if I could. :-(

Beitrag von TheReal

Is it horrible of me that I AdBlocked the whitelist request?

Beitrag von Haxton

The video ads are unbearable, annoying and often two of the same video starts playing on the same page - slightly delayed of course. There is no mute by default and on some there is no moute button at all. What's worse - the same ad will not honor my mute choice on replay.

Needless to say I will avoid these products, but I will also be installing addons to selectively block the video ads.

I have no problem supporting wowhead via static or animated ads - banner or otherwise, but the video ads are obnoxious.

Beitrag von Balgair

Wasn't sure which thread to post this suggestion in, this one seems maybe a little more relevant (if old) than the bad ad ones so I'll try here.

I've been looking at the premium subscription, since I do feel a little bad about using Wowhead so much but always using adblock (the recent threads about various annoying/risque ads are the reason why I will not be unblocking the ads), but the price is really far too high! $9.99 for 3 months is too much for a lot of people, and with the huge list of features (none of which interest me), I'm wondering if there's a possibility of making a cutprice version, which only removes ads? I'd pay $9.99 to get rid of them for a year, but not for three months.

A lot of us don't have huge amounts of money to spare, and paying that much for something we can do for free via our browsers... well, I for one can't justify it. The other features are all meaningless to me, so stripping them out, and getting the price down to something reasonable for those of us on lower incomes, might get a few takers?

Beitrag von djbuchanan

Sometimes I have 2 or 3 screens open and all of a sudden I am assaulted by a several adverts playing sound at once... I guess this is not the forum to complain, or even let Wowhead know that this kind of thing is going on at end user level. I wonder if they even care?(##RESPBREAK##)16##DELIM##asakawa##DELIM##This is a really old thread and we have some very recent threads on this topic currently so I'm gonna lock this one.

Beitrag von perculia

The best way to leave feedback on a bad ad is to go to Feedback at the top right of the page and then select the "Bad Advertisement" option. This will generate metadata with a tool we've built to help our ad provider target the bad ad.

Over the holidays we had a sharp increase in bad ads and worked with our ad provider to remove the offending ads yesterday. If you'd like to learn more about who can/can't choose the ads and how ads work on Wowhead, check out this thread.

We really appreciate every report we get because it helps us present a more thorough report to our ad network and get them removed faster.(##RESPBREAK##)2##DELIM##perculia##DELIM##

Re: Wowhead ads: "Please whitelist us"

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