Uplifting news; snake silliness; LJ is Serious Business.

[azurelunatic]

Good news: Jerry Falwell bitched about Fallwell.com, but got told to STFU and/or talk to the hand by the Supreme Court.

cadhla has snakes. Snakes are very, very "smart".


And we're banned from LJ just because
We trolled a newspost and started a big old fuss
It wasn't even goatse; it was just a post or four
But LJ doesn't want us anymore.
http://www.ovff.org/pegasus/songs/banned-from-argo.html

lj_ads is open and all that good jazz. I went over there and (fairly politely) expressed my nearly unutterable rage that LJ is using flash ads. The top four things that people didn't want were pop-ups, noise, flash, and over-blinkie-ness. There are no pop-ups, all noise is "on explicit turn-on by user, default to off", there is a policy against over-blinkie -- but flash/shockwave is allowed.

This annoys me for four distinct reasons:

1. I don't like flash being used for ads. Period.


2. If you don't have the programs installed, viewing a page with a flash ad will prompt you to install it, and there is no way to tell it "I am never going to install it" or "I do not have rights to install it on this computer".


3. Flash is typically bandwidth-intensive and processor-intensive.


4. A whole lot of people voiced their objections to flash at the outset. lj_ads chose to ignore that feedback. They did so at their peril; I have lost a lot of respect for them because of this, and am less inclined to view them favorably. User goodwill is a good thing to have. Goodwill of the woman who writes up the summaries of the news comments is a good thing to have. (Am I going to deliberately try and piss off/be hurtful to lj_ads staff, who are the co-workers of my co-workers in Support? No. Am I going to be half as sympathetic as I otherwise would have been? Not now. Not unless Flash goes away.)

If you oppose the use of Flash/Shockwave in LJ Sponsored+ ads, by all means go over to lj_ads and firmly but politely voice your opposition. Bitching in your own journal won't do much. Bitching in your own journal and repeating it over there in a mature fashion might do a little more.

Comments

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

http://community.livejournal.com/lj_ads/1886.html?view=197726#t197726

There's my 2 cents.

[sithjawa.livejournal.com]

As an aside, showing ads when logged out but not in free logged-in journals is quite a clever way to get ad money out of everyone, even paid users, without annoying free users overmuch.

(It annoys me, though, when combined with Flash, 'cause while I keep logged in on my own 'puter, that means computers I'm less likely to have privs on are more likely to try to install Flash on me. Oh good.)

[ataniell93.livejournal.com]

http://community.livejournal.com/lj_ads/1886.html?thread=197726#t197726

Er, try that one.

[crisavec.livejournal.com]

4 years ago I'd have been rather pissed about using flash for ads...but once Flash 7 and 8 came out I don't consider it that big a deal anymore.

Re: Flash ads

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

I'm really happy with Flashblock. It means never needing to do flash if I don't want to while I can in a few places.

[azurelunatic]

Yay for feedback!

[azurelunatic]

Exactly. I used to have to do the "NO, I'm not fucking going to install Flash on the school computer lab machine!" battle every time I checked my yahoo mail at school.

[azurelunatic]

What's the difference that made you change your mind?

Re: Flash ads

[azurelunatic]

Looks shiny, but it's not quite installing right for me. Maybe in the morning I'll have more poke time.

[crisavec.livejournal.com]

Basically? It stopped sucking. They cleaned out alot of the crap in the flashcode, put in better controls for the people coding in Flash so they stop breaking/crashing/otherwise mangling browsers, and gave the end user alittle more control over what flash does(it could be better even now, but its still a vast improvement).

At this point about the only areas I see problems with Flash in a real world setting are on heavily tweaked pages with every thing but the kitchensink in the webpage..and in a situation like that eventually SOMETHING is going to break. Prime example is someone's tricked out LJ style that has something in the code that freaks out over a flash-embed like the voice post player.

I'm not saying its perfect, but in my experience(working on everything from a small 3 user home network, to a 50 user nonprofit network, to a 600 user medium enterprise network, to a 150K user massive enterprise networks) its simply no longer bad enough for me to take notice and not use/allow it.

Alot of the hostility towards Flash is 2 fold. Some dates back to when it really did suck miserably, and the rest is because you can't block/filter/fold/spindle/mutilate content thats embedded in flash..You can either accept it, or not install Flash(or now, use Flashblock, but its essentially the same as not installing it). You can't DO anything else, and that combined with its previous instability leads for hard feelings that may never entirely fade.

Granted, I've seen people do incredibly stupid things with even the most recent versions...like a SSA training CD that was one monolithic 48MB flashfile, that was locked to the CD it was on, and somehow so badly coded that we never did get it to run. Still though...just because people do some stupid things with it doesn't make it inherently bad.