On 1 Jan 2006 at 16:17, Nyenyec N nyenyec@gmail.com wrote:

BTW I wouldn't mind non-obtrusive ads (a'la gmail) if it means that the servers are more responsive and the software is more featureful.

But would the ads always stay "non-obtrusive"? Google has, so far, been pretty good at keeping its ads from interfering with its content, but they seem to be the rare exception. All too many sites that have gone the "ad-supported" route, even ones that started out in a solidly noncommercial way with no ads of any sort, have been unable to resist going ever further down the path of intrusiveness, including popups, popunders, flashy animations, and all sorts of silly tricks with layers and scripts that make the ads jump all over the place and get in the way. Furthermore, the entire design of the site starts being made with the ads in mind rather than the users, for instance breaking articles up artificially into bite-size chunks where you have to keep following "Next" links, in order to serve more ads, and using fixed-pixel-width layouts so they always know exactly where the ads fit in, and the main content ends up in a narrow bacon- strip column.

If you've got problems with unresponsive servers on Wikipedia, just try using a site that gets ads from various remote servers, and when they're running slowly (as happens often) the whole site stalls in its loading and rendering until the ad manages to load. The ads' scripting keeps getting more devious all the time in order to try to force popups and animations on users with browsers that try to block that stuff, and sometimes it even manages to totally crash or hang some browsers.