I don’t think it’s any secret that I hate advertising. I block nearly all of them with AdBlock+ and NoScript (whitelisting few sites, temporarily allowing only scripts critical to viewing content I want), and if the occasional animated GIF slips through on some random site that I rarely visit, then I’ll just “quick-nuke” it with Remove This Object. If I’ll be back to the site, then I use a custom Adblock filter or Yarip to remove it for good. If it’s just a static banner and it’s not huge or on a site I visit often, I can ignore it. I was reading an article today about a site asking for votes from its users as to whether it should start using IntelliTXT ads, and I had no idea what that might be, so I went to the suggested page to find out, temporarily allowed scripts, and…nothing. Fired up Epiphany (deliberately does not have ads blocked in any way, just in case I need it that way for something), went to the page again, and…holy sweet fuck, Batman! Nice to know what I’m missing, and to whatever method I’m currently using that manages to block this shite, I love you. Keywords in the text are displayed in a different colour with a double underlined link (gosh, that’s not distracting!), and if you mouseover the text–not only click, just mouseover–it pops up a relevant (or questionably relevant) advertisement, and as I understand it, they stay until they’re manually closed. Some even have sound and video (!!!), and any will interrupt scrolling whilst they load. Oh HELL, no! WTF? Didn’t advertisers learn their lesson when browsers started coming with pop-up blockers that were turned on by default because even computer illiterates hated pop-ups? This is just…”pop-ups 2.0″ and visitors aren’t going to like IntelliTXT any more than they did pop-ups.

Interesting! I’d originally named the image “intellitxt-ad.png”, but WP wouldn’t let me put it in until I renamed it. I wonder whether that was because of “ad” or “intellitxt”, or both? Anyway, good on WP. 🙂