Since more and more people are blocking the classic kind of popups, "layer ads" have become more common (ads that are displayed over the actual page content). Extremely annoying. Anyone here who has found an effective way to block them?

No, no matter which extensions or methods I tried, these annoying 'things' are always turning up again.

I have found quite a good way. When I get on a site with those I just don't visit them again.

That's a good attitude. However, it will be hard when there are too many of them...

Agreed; luckily I come across one of these adverts only once a week or so, but still they're extremely annoying and confusing. One can only hope there will be an effective method of blocking them by the time they become widespread.

Since most free hosts seem to use such ads nowadays, just not visiting these sites - as tempting as it sounds - isn't very practical if you don't want to restrict yourself to huge commercial sites...

Well, any site which hosts ads is a potential spyware and malware spreader, so avoiding those sites is already quite high in my list to be frank...

I think there is an important difference between pop-ups and layer ads.

Pop-ups force the (not special-configured) client to do things the user (normally) don't want it to do, while layer-ads are only part of the (whole) content.

So there is no right for the user / visitor to surpress such layer-ads, especially if the author is making its main revenue out of it, even if those layer ads are very annoying and sometimes even rude.

That's valid for any kind of advertisement in my opinion - including pop-ups. If you decide to use a site's services, you have to agree to the terms under which they're offering them. So much for the theory.

However, there are limits to anything, of course. I allowed pop-ups to open for a long time, even when everybody else was already blocking them. At some point, it just made daily browsing impossible, though. So while I am sorry for those sites which actually depend on pop-ups (or insert anything here) and don't overdo it on the whole (I always thought it's perfectly alright to launch pop-ups on download gateways for example), the general greed killed modesty in this case. Same will happen to overlay ads and also the next followup which will undoubtly come.

Edit: I should add that I'm also already blocking Flash ads since I do think ads with sound are way too obstrusive.

Edited by Mr Creosote at 16:57 on December, 03rd 2004

That's true - you can't generally define what kind of ads are acceptable though. That's a decision of the users. Therefore it's their right to disagree with the ad conditions and block certain ads in my opinion. On the other hand, the webmaster is free to decide whether he wants to stop running his site because - for example - the income from the ads has decreased. The users and the webmasters have to meeet somewhere in the middle.

The big challenge...

If the layer ads are being produced by a remote script, the script can be blocked by conventional banner blocking methods. If the code that produces the layer ads is inline, then there is still one way I know of to remove the crap, Proxomitron. Proxomitron is the only adblocker/proxy I know of that can actually edit pages that it intercepts (most can only block access to certain sites/files). As such, proxomitron can remove any ad from any page.

Additionaly, if the layer ads are conveniently named (like <div id="layer ad"> or <div class="layer ad">), then they can be blocked in firefox/mozilla pretty easily simply by editing the usercontent.css file. Something like:
#layer ad {display:none !important; }

Edited by Cypherswipe at 19:03 on December, 05th 2004

Yes, but the next logical step is to create random id's, for example by simple php-/jsp-script-logic for every page-request. I don't want to see such a huge user-css-file, with all possibilities of character-combinations for - let's say - id's with a maximum length of 10.

I don't think its the right way to edit the pages before they reached their target (client). After you received the page and had a look at it you may change it in every way, since every website is open-source.

Edit:
I correct myself. The HTML-Output of every Website is Open Source.

Edited by dregenRocks at 09:42 on December, 06th 2004

Which is something all the idiots who use stuff like "anti-right-click scripts" don't seem to understand - as soon as you see a website, you can also view and modify its source.

The good old days...

Editing it at that point is far more hassle than simply clicking the X or waiting for it to go away on it's own or whatever. As long as you don't copy a page and try to claim it as your own, you can edit the page any time you wish, regardless whether that be before you even view it, or after you view it.


Funniest thing about the anti-right click scripts is that 98% of them are only effective in IE.

Funniest thing about them is that they're completely useless regardless of the client's browser, because the page is already stored in the cache.

Exactly. Do they think the pictures do not end up on the clients computer, but rather somehow float in a mythical "cyberspace"?

I think the fact that 98% are completely in effective is funnier. There are a dozen ways to get the page/images/whatever regardless of such scripts, but most require several steps that you wouldn't have to do if it weren't for the script. The fact that the people go to the effort to put the script on their site, just to not have it do much of anything in any browser other than IE, is hilarious. (In gecko based browsers, you get their annoying alert, but it comes up behind the context menu, all yopu have to do is close it once you've saved the pic. In opera, most of the scripts don't have any effect at all.)

The scripts can all be bypassed in at least one (usually all) of several ways:
1) Turn off javascript and reload the page.
2) Click file->save page->complete
3) Hit ctrl+s.
4) Poke around in your cache folder for the page/images.
5) Use IE 6+'s image toolbar to save the pic.
6) Left click on the pic (assuming it isn't a link) then click the context menu button on most windows keyboards (usually located between the windows and ctrl buttons to the right of the keyboard). If the image is also a link, you can use the tab button to cycle to it instead of clicking it.

Excuse me, I was talking about morality and forgot that it doesn't mean anything on the web. (Don't want exclude myself from that critique)

After all, if you don't want anything (ads for example), don't do a http-request on it. But it may be difficult to do and to justify why you want to use free content without accepting the conditions of the author. It's just not the right thing, regardless how easy and it is to do and how annoying the ads are. It's just an offer to the visitor and not its property. Or am I getting something wrong?