I was just wondering if the advertisement windows that show up on the right-hand of the screen bother anyone else while they're watching animations. On my screen, they continue to flash up after I've started the animation and won't let me close them, which is really distracting when I'm watching something as fabuous as LGG where you really need to see the whole screen. Is there something I can do to fix this? Has anyone else noticed this or am I just hallucinating...over and over again...

Finally someone who has the same problem as me!! I thought I was going insane.

The same thing happens to me, and once in a while it compelty messes up what I am doing and i have to get of the site then back on.

In one of the other animation posts (sorry i cant be more specific) , Mata helped me find a way to make it work.

Sorry I can't actually be of help. But its nice to know I am not any more insane the normally.

Thanks, good to know someone else has this problem - phew!

So whooo knows the magic way to kill the ads? Hmmm?

i dont get that.... i dont think....

have you tryed right clicking and selecting "block images from ..."?
That MIGHT do it...... er.....

I'm very serious about trying to make the ads as unintrusive as possible on my site. I'm not sure I've seen what you're referring to so I'll need a bit more information:

1 Do you mean that there are actual pop-up advert boxes appearing? If that's happening then I'm 99% sure that this would not be due to my site. I've got no code from my pages to make that happen and I will be very annoyed with my advertising chap if that is happening.

2 Is this happening with a particular company's adverts or is it all of them?

3 What precisely do you mean by 'they continue to flash up after I've started the animation and won't let me close them'?

Like I say, there really should not be any pop-up boxes generated from my site. If that is happening then I will need to know who they are from and I'll get them removed, but I highly doubt that this is the case. I would be likely to have heard of it from more than one person, because I find them intensely annoying too.

If you are getting repeating pop-ups then it's likely that you actually have some software on your machine that is doing this. I'm pretty sure that standard advertising pop-ups will only appear once when you load a page, not reappearing unless you reopen the page. If you are getting one turning up at random times, such as during an animation, then that suggests that the fault is not with my site, but with your computer.

There are two great pieces of software that might help you here:

Spybot http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html

Ad-Aware http://www.download.com/Ad-Aware-SE-Person...ubj=dl&tag=top5

Both have their personal strengths so its a good idea to use both regularly, especially if you browse the web using Internet Explorer. Simply download them, install them, update their databases and scan your machine. If you are getting random pop-ups then I'd place money that you've got something infecting your machine, and by the sound of the frequency it might be more than one thing.

On a related note; my advertising contact is a very reasonable chap and does respond well to requests to change things. If there are any intensely annoying adverts (lots of flashing/vibrating images, unprompted sound effects) please do report them to me so I can ask for them to be removed.

If they're not random pop-ups and I've misunderstood what you mean then please give me the information requested above and I'll see what I can do about it.

I'm also not sure that this is connected to the site, but I'm certain it's not something that my computer is generating. I had that problem before and have fixed it with several ad-killing programs like the ones you mentioned.

To clarify, though, the ads do not show up in a separate window. They appear as a part of the site page when I open an animation, as a long, narrow rectangle on the right side of the screen. I've seen these types of ads in many places such as livejournal, geocities, etc. The difference is usually they have a small "x" in the upper corner of the ad which you can use to close them, whereas these do not.
It seems that when I open an animation, the ad shows up overlapping it on the right hand side, so that it is sometimes covering the "Click" button that starts the animation. Sometimes if I move my mouse over the animation the ad will 'move to back' and the animation will overlap it, and sometimes not, and the ad will remain covering the right hand of the picture.

It is not one company, however, but all of them - Ask Jeeves, Poetry.com, ads for free DVD players, etc.

It is only one ad per page, the problem is that there is no "x" that I can use to close them and they appear overlapping the animation.

However, if I'm really the only person experiencing this problem then I'll just find a way to deal with it. But thank you for listening.

That sounds like a problem with the formatting of the page itself. What resolution is your screen set to? Try maximising the browsing window with the animation in so it covers the whole screen. When I made firefox really small the animation overlapped the ad. Umm...Mata?

Right, I understand what you're talking about now.

I suspect that you are browsing with unusual software, by this I mean not IE or Firefox. I know that Mozilla has issues rendering CSS z-index levels. These are the things that are used to make sure that stuff like adverts remain on the bottom layer of the screen underneath the animations if you are viewing on a very small screen. Both Firefox and IE use CSS standards which mean that adverts slip behind the animation if there is any overlap.

This is the second point: I can only assume that you've got either quite a low screen resolution, or the search bar constantly open on the side of your browser (which dramatically reduces the viewing size of the screen, forcing things to overlap) or both!

I know that people like their odd browsers, but there really isn't such thing as a webpage that will display correctly for everyone on every system. I know that around 0.9% of people visiting my site use Mozilla, when you then factor in the people using a very small display resolution (by which I mean 800x600, the next standard width up from there, 1024, should be fine) then the advert overlap should only be a problem for a very tiny amount of people.

So, the solution: maximise the viewing space! Close down search bars at the side of your screen, make the window as big as possible and then there will be no overlap. The vast majority of computers these days down even blink at the idea of a 1024 resolution, so you might want to think about raising your computer up to that if it's not already.

Thanks, Mata. It is Firefox but yes, my resolution is v. low, so I'll just increase it. Thanks again!

Wait..This may be mixing something up, but I used Firefox and it was on high resolution, but it still was above the animation.

Now i use Interent Explorer, with high resolution and its still doing that.

I dont know why its still doing that..

OTA, that's really weird. Could you take a screen grab and show me (email or upload it somewhere), because there's no way that that should be happening, and it sounds like you must have something different going on there.

Greenbaby, if you are using Firefox then there shouldn't really be a problem, the adverts should slip behind the animations if your screen is on a very low resolution, I designed the pages specifically so that this would be the case. How very odd. What version of Firefox are you using? (You can get this info from clicking 'Help' then 'About Mozilla Firefox'.)

I'm using version 1.0.3, but I don't know how to do a screen grab.

Mata, I really appreciate your help, but I only have this problen if the resolution is on the lowest setting (800 by 600 pix). I just don't want to waste your time if no one else has the problem.

Often if one person has a problem and speaks about it then there are ten others who don't say a word. It's very odd that it's happening with a recent version of Firefox because the code has been set up for the last few builds...

I understand what the issue is for you, so now it's a question of working out why it's happening. Sorry to be a pain, I'm trying to work through things that might be causing this.

Could you list any extensions that you have on your machine?

Also, do you have any specific software that looks at web content, such as Norton System-works?

Could you also check to see if it happens in IE too please? If it does then that suggests that the problem isn't the coding but compatability with a piece of software on the machine, which helps me narrow things down.

OTA's one is a bit different because it's happening in IE too for her, which is odd, so I'd like to see a screen grab of that. you can do a screen grab by pressing the 'prt Scr' button on a PC keyboard then opening anything you can paste images into and pasting it there, such as a Word document, Photoshop, etc. It may be that there is something odd going on that I might be able to spot. I might not be able to, but it's worth a go!

Okay! Extensions: I have Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition Version 2002

I also have McAfee Security Center (Personal Firewall, VirusScan, etc)

I tried opening the animations in IE and had no problem - the ads went behind the animation and stayed there.
Some screen grabs I took can be seen: http://www.geocities.com/sailorstarforsaken28/Screen1.bmp
http://www.geocities.com/sailorstarforsaken28/Screen2.bmp
http://www.geocities.com/sailorstarforsaken28/Screen3.bmp
http://www.geocities.com/sailorstarforsaken28/Screen4.bmp

The ads will just keep flashing behind and in front, so these are the best pics I could take. Hope it helps!

Okay, so it works in IE for you, that's something. That means that whatever is causing it is something to do with Firefox, and that pretty much rules out McAfee.

I notice that the adverts are all of that 'list' type. Does it happen with other ones? It might be something to do with the US adverts, which would be interesting in itself.

The Firefox extensions you've got installed will be listed under Tools>Extensions.

I'm not sure what you mean by "list" ads. Yes, most the ads are that type that just have text about websites, etc. But there are other kinds as well - Vonage, Spirit Airlines, monster.com, etc.

But all of them are that shape, if that's what you mean.

And I do not have any extensions for Firefox.

By 'list' I mean just a load of text rather than pictures advertising a single thing. I assume from your reply that the image ones do the same thing too?

You don't have any extensions installed... Okay, now I'm really flumoxed! I'm really running out of ideas now, but there must be something causing it... I'll ponder for a while.

Just to clarify, yes - the image ads do the same thing. Good luck, and thanks!

Mata: I've been trying to get a screen grab for you but now the animations wont even load up. Nothing comes up on the screen even when I refresh a number of times.

Once I can get that little problem figured out, I'll get you a screen grab. But for now..can someone please help me with this little hinderence?

Thanks.

Is this one particular animation or all of them? If it's one then that's probably a caching problem. Clear your browser cache and that should sort that out. If it's all of them then it's likely that your computer for some reason thinks that my animations are adverts and so is blocking them. Try checking whatever ad-blocking systems you have, maybe disable one at a time to work out which one is causing the problem.

Right now it is all the animations.
I tried a few diffrent things.

I made it so more cookies could be used: thats worked before; not this time.
I made the privacy setting lower which also usually works; Nada.


I'm not exactly what else I can do wihtout me killing my computer (I warn you, I
am bad with computers so they are all out to get me)
Once I can get this figured out, I will use a screen grab.

Ad's which look like windows are a common trick, people think they are a pop up and click the [X] which activates the ad.

They are usually easy to spot when they look like a Windows window in Safari

Ok, so I got it to work.

What i did was went to internet options and I saw that there was no check mark on the box where it says "always expand ALT text for image". By clicking this, the image i needed came up AND the ads on the side diseppreared.

Thanks for the help, I couldnt even have gotten the computer started up if someone wasnt here telling me how.

How very strange. Am I right in saying that you now don't see the banners?

The banners can be seen. But there are either far away from the animation or there is just a white strip and nothing ends up coming onto the banner.

They arn't in the way of the animation though, most of the time, they are far enough on the side of the animation that I forget they are there.

They were always supposed to be over to the right with the animation on the left. The gap between them depends on the resolution of your monitor.

They are on the right, but they are farther on the right then before and once in awhile, the actual advert doesnt come up, its just a white box. But the animations work and thats what matters.

The ads should be appearing dead-centre under the blue mailing-list box, so their edge should be around 60-ish pixels from the right-side of the browser window. I'm still not at all sure how they managed to appear anywhere else. I suppose it's possible that there might have been a browser error when it was loading the CSS file, causing display problems, but that's a bit of a remote chance.

If you're sometimes getting a plain white box then that probably means that something is blocking the adverts. Never mind, like you say, at least the animations are working now!

Thanks for all your help. I can hardly turn on the computer much less figure out about pixelation and such. Thanks again.