How to block *really* annoying ads on NZHerald?

Hi All,

The Herald has started placing some really annoying ads (mainly it
seems) for HP on their site.

This page has one as I type (not sure if they always fire or not):

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10343123

They appear in the middle of the screen *over* the text of the story
so you cannot read it at first until it dances off the screen.

Note that this is *not* a pop-up window, they appear to be flash
animations or something like that.

Does anyone have a suggestion for blocking this type of thing
specifically?

Thanks,

Alan.

 

If you are using Firefox, you can get the Adblock extension that lets
you block specific Flash content like this.

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock

 

easy fix, complain to the herald, complain to HP tell them that due to
the intrusive nature of the add you will be going out of your way *not*
to purchase from them, and you will be telling everyone you know about
this fact.

It will get their attention pretty fast

Greg

 

Unfortunately not at work - I am using IE6 and cannot really change
that.

Sorry - I should have specified the browser.

I though of using the HOSTS file, but I cannot work out where the
flash files are being served from (and if they are being served from
the nzherald.co.nz domain then obviously I cannot block that entirely
without killing the entire site).

Any other ideas?

Thanks,

Alan.

 

Hi Greg,

Thank you for the suggestion.

You are probably right, but they are not the only ones to be doing
this (site or advertiser) so I was looking for a more generic
solution, and also something less time consuming than engaging with
the 'culprits' one-by-one.

Also, the truth is that whilst the ads are intensely annoying, they
will not actually stop me going to the NZHerald site, nor will they
stop me buying HP products, and I will not lie to either organisation
about that. However, if anyone reading this *does* feel that they
would stop buying from HP over this, then by all means go right ahead
and tell them so!

Any more technically oriented / passive ideas?

Alan.

 

They are not being served from NZherald - they come from multiple
dedicated ad servers. You should be able to find where they come from by
examining the source code carefully.

Cheers,
Nicholas Sherlock

 

If your permissions allow you, make the Herald site a "Restricted Site".

Go Tools|InternetOptions and then select the Secruity tab. Then put the
Herald site in the Restricted Sites list. That's how I stopped the Stuff
"pop-up" ads at my work which are also some kind of Flash thingy.

 

From my current Mozilla adblock settings
http://ads.apn.co.nz/jserver/*
That seems to clean it up nicely.
No HP (or any other) ads on the OP's quoted page.

 

I would think therefore that adding the entry to the hosts file null-
routing ads.apn.co.nz should solve the problem.
i.e. 127.0.0.1 ads.apn.co.nz

I have this site set in my blocked pages on my proxy/firewall on my server.
This works for all PCs in the house and works well when I reinstall on a PC
without having to add all the annoying ad sites.


--
Mark Heyes (New Zealand)
See my pics at www.gigatech.co.nz (last updated 16-August-05)
"The person on the other side was a young woman. Very obviously a
young woman. There was no possible way she could have been mistaken
for a young man in any language, especially Braille."
Maskerade

 

Blocking the adds in Firefox works well. IE is a pig after using Firefox
anyway.

 

Let me put it this way: I see no ad, no animation when I load that URL.
I see one little red tag [ad] which tells me where one has been blocked.

I use Mozilla Firefox as browser. I use The Proxomitron as a spam
filter. Firefox is manually set to use The Proxomitron as proxy server,
and I have the 'macromedia flash killer' filter turned on in 'The
Proxomitron'. ( you can selectively enable and disable filters, download
new ones, even write your own if you can program a bit and use boolean
expressions).
Since I tend to get migraines triggered by animated ads,I make sure I
*never* have to look at the damn things.

http://duke.usask.ca/~macphed/prox/

h.t.h. -Peter

 

Didn't read the whole thread before replying. Proxomitron also works
with MSIE and Opera if you set it up as proxy for http ...

-P.

 

Buy a paper copy of the newspaper? Then you can choose whether to read the
advertisements or not, in between reading the news articles that you have
purchased.

This problem was raised some time ago in the nz.general group (IIRC), and in
my opinion was a case of gift horse : mouth.

 

That one is served from bs.serving-sys.com (I kid you not) and I already
have it blocked in Firefox.

 

Oh, OK. I have bs.serving-sys.com blocked for that page too and figured it
came from there. (As that's what's showing at the bottom of Firefox).