I’ve always hated pop-up advertising with a passion. I find it hard to imagine anything more annoying than these pop-up and slide-in (my name for them) ads that jump in front of you when you visit a site.
Yes, I do believe in right of web site owners to put anything they want on their site (excluding illegal stuff, of course), but I also believe in my right to restrict certain unwanted things from invading my computer screen.
If you dislike these kinds of obnoxious ads as much as I do, you are probably already using the pop-up stopper features of your web browser or a third-party pop-up blocker. I’ve been using them as long as they have been available.
It’s no secret that there is a war of sorts — not unlike the war between the spammers and the anti-spam companies — raging between the pop-up ad designers and the pop-up stopper software applications. When the pop-up stoppers successfully stop a certain type of pop-up ad, the pop-up ad designers get to work on a way to beat it and sneak their ads past the blocker.
I’ve noticed an increasing number of these pop-up and slide-in ads sneaking past my blocker lately. You know the ones I mean. Despite your best efforts to stop them, they still manage to invade your screen. The slide-ins, as I call them, are particularly notorious, and since they don’t “pop up” they easily slip by pop-up blockers.
There are some steps you can take to defeat these intrusive advertising methods. The method I use is probably only useful for sites you plan to visit more than once. If it is a site you will probably not visit again, it isn’t really worth the effort of changing the settings for that site in your browser.
I normally use Internet Explorer and it is still the most popular browser in use, so this article relates only to that particular browser. I’m sure there are similar settings available on most of the other popular browsers.
When you come across a sneaky pop-up, pop-under or slide-in ad on a site you will likely want to visit again, you can add that site to your restricted sites list. This prevents the site from executing certain types of code on your PC and since most of these sneaky pop-ups and slide-in ads require that code to function, they will be disabled.
Keep in mind that other functions may also be disabled when you add a site to the restricted sites list, so in some cases, this will not be practical if you need access to those functions for other things. I have found, however, that it seems to be a perfectly resonable solution for sites I visit once in a while just to read a news story or something simple like that.
To add a site to your Internet Explorer restricted sites list, follow these instructions on the Microsoft web site.
Once you have added a particular site to the restricted sites list, you should not be bothered with intrusive advertising methods like pop-ups, pop-unders and slide-ins from that site again. Until the ad designers figure out a way around it, that is.
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