Obnoxious Ads
I’ve received a few reports today that there are some ads covering up content. If you see an ad in a place where it shouldn’t be, or if it’s playing unprompted audio, don’t worry, we’re not trying to destroy FanGraphs with ads. These types of ads annoy us as much as they annoy you (we use the site too) and they are not allowed on FanGraphs.
If we see one of these ads ourselves, we take the steps to remove it from the site immediately. If we only get reports of an ad and can not see it ourselves, it can be difficult to track down and the more information we can get about the ad the better.
The best thing you can do is to take a screenshot of the ad, or send us a description of the ad (what is the product?) and send an e-mail to ads+feedback@fangraphs.com and we will remove the offending ad as soon as we can track it down.
Update: It currently appears to be an issue with Internet Explorer only and ads in general. This should be fixed shortly.
Second Update: This should be corrected now. If you are still seeing issues, please let us know. For those interested, this was actually the result of a change in Google’s ad serving system and apparently it ended up breaking a number of website layouts in Internet Explorer that use third party ads in conjunction with DoubleClick for Publishers.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
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This might just be a browser thing, but it’s literally every one of those ads that drops down. Is there any way to minimize/get rid of those? Is that just Evidon’s thing? If so PLEASE FIRE THEM. Haha.
Thanks for your help with this, Dave (and others).
For those who have problems with these things, and are comfortable with computers, I highly recommend Firefox’s noscript which allows you to disable the running of scripts by certain domains. Of course even standard ad-blocker addons will make a big difference in many cases.
But of course we don’t block ads at small sites we love, like Fangraphs.
Have not had a problem with it using Chrome or Firefox.
Nor I.
This site could certainly use more ads featuring women (preferably the type with gigantic breasts) and beer. If there was some way to combine the two then that would be quite splendid.
Damn, I have small breasts, but my aspyness and my Marxism-Leninism prevents me from attracting men.
I wonder if most men find Marxism-Leninism more of a turn-off than being a Scientologist.
I don’t see why that would prevent you from attracting men unless of course this Marxism has driven you to grow an epic beard. On a side note, I am intrigued by this word, “aspyness.”
I bet most people here know how sabermetrics turns off women.
Erm…
I hope this is a joke that looks like it could have been a serious comment on a worse site.
For Dave:
(1) Please don’t alienate female readers.
(2) I can look at Fangraphs at work. I never worry that someone will come into my office and be like, “uhm, what are you looking at?” Bikini models would change that.
(3) Please don’t promote the idea that all men are neanderthals. One of the shining characteristics of sabermetrics is that it is for reflective people. I would like the atmosphere and feel of this site to promote that. There’s Bleacher Report for everyone else.
Shaking head
Please do not remove the fantasy baseball/football ads with the hot chicks. those are my favorites.
The ref uniform and the baseball uniform.
A problem with IE? Get outta here.
The problem I have is when spambots constantly necro old posts.
Example: The bottom 3 posts here:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/fantasy-football-for-the-saber-set/
There has to be some sort of spambot prevention on this site, I mean, it should be a reasonably simple thing to do. No idea what this sites CMS is (WordPress? vBulletin? something like that? Heaven forbid FanGraphs made their own…) but really, there are so many spambots linking to their random websites from Fangraphs, it’s pretty ridiculous that they can’t weed them out somehow. In the cases of the examples above, the spambots names are the links.
Anyway, accruing too many of these things can do things like mess with your stats regarding linkbacks, clutter up your Recently Commented box, bother peoples RSS feeds and so on. Mostly, it presents a seriously unprofessional attitude to readers, and it will eventually devolve into a larger problem than it is now if you just leave it forever.
I’ve made a couple comments about this before, but obviously it just continues, so I figured I’d post here too.
We actually blog the majority of the spam, which is something like 20,000 messages a day, but there’s usually 10 or 15 that get through each day. We try and clean it up, but sometimes wordpress spam prevention doesn’t work. Might look into other solutions since it’s become more of a problem lately.
I used to run a forum and understand completely, if that’s the case. My experience was, the longer it existed, the more of a problem it became until it became so unmanageable that major changes had to be made (and with nowhere near your resources). Each link on the site to some awful spammy garbage was like a beacon for more spam, as if to say, “Hey, the defenses are down, get them!” like Pujols batting vs Brian Matusz.
Thanks for at least acknowledging and explaining, I didn’t really imagine it was anywhere near that bad.
Somehow, this is Yuniesky Betancourt’s fault.
People still use IE? No way!
I use IE to look at Fangraphs during lunch at work. They don’t allow us to use any other browsers on our work computers.
That said, I hate IE.
I just have to say, I’m amazed that Fangraphs is so good and yet free. I don’t understand how you make any money because it seems like the ads you do show intentionally are limited. It seems too good to be true. Seriously.
Dave C. said in a chat once that the best thing for readers to do to support the site is to visit multiple times a day, which I do, gladly; but how is that enough?
Internet Explorer? What’s that?
Hasn’t been a problem in the last week or two, but I do occasionally get such ads even on Chrome. It’s especially annoying since I tend to go down the homepage clicking each article into a new tab,and then I’ll have to figure out which tab started playing the noisy ad. I love that these ads are not allowed, though, thanks! 🙂
I don’t see any banner adds and I have zero add ins / ad blocking software. All I see is a small fox sports add below the google search. This is with Safari.
Are ads all that funds this site?
ads