Thank You for Making This A Great Forum

Pallas · 2024-07-09T11:43:04+00:00

I've noticed how much energy there is in the PACT challenge, the sight-reading thread, and really any thread where someone's asking for help. I just wanted t...

WieWaldi

Just visited PW with a plain browser without adblockers... 😡
Really annoying - everywhere on the screen there is something moving and wobbling around. You have to constantly click away the bottom banner and the post boxes are moving on the screen because some ads are included after a few seconds. It is really 🤢🤮

For Firefox I recommend "UBlock origin", you can select frames of the browser manually that are not loaded at all. The left and the right ad-panels are gone forever. 👍

WieWaldi

Pallas This thread is marked "Off-topic".
Does this only work for entire threads, or is there also a possibility to mark single posts as off-topic. (I would find the option to mark single posts more useful, combined with an option to filter them out)

And the most important question, how did you do that?

TC3

WieWaldi If you hit Start Discussion, you can choose one or more tags. The one at the bottom is Off-Topic.

Pallas

WieWaldi

I think you can ignore a person, ignore a thread, but I'm not sure if you can ignore just one comment. I don't see a way to mark a comment off-topic.

WieWaldi

TC3 Thank you, I didn't find it before.

Do you know if there is an option to mark single posts "off-topic". I mean a thread is actually a topic itself.

Often in a thread, only a few posts are really dealing with the topic itself. And after a while many threads are becoming a smalltalk-chitchat. It would be nice thing if posters (and mods) could give the own post a category like:

topic
off-topic
topic-related-humor
general comments (like "I second your opinion, thanks for that post")

This and a filter for that would allow to find the important information much faster.

Pallas

WieWaldi The cameraderie in this forum is my favorite part, so I'm hoping there's a solution that allows folks to choose their own adventure. I see nothing unimportant about the connections being made here. If you'd like to make a suggestion on how to improve your own experience, there's a request thread in the Notes forum!

Sophia

Oh I definitely second that Pallas 🙂 I'm a notorious Thread Derailer and I'd forget to mark my comments 'off topic' for sure. And to mark a funny comment as "heads up for a funny comment - here is the funny comment - end of funny comment" would, well, instantly take the 'funny' out of the comment 😃

I don't really see an issue with threads derailing into fun discussions. I think the recent one where we're talking about non-classical music is a great example of the topic being mostly exhausted, but now morphing into a super fun thread where people are discussing their favourite non-classical musicians.

I think a forum resembles a pub discussion, somewhat. It starts with a certain topic and then explodes in different directions without much harm, with people chiming in and others opting out. Some get a little passionate and that's okay too. In the end, everyone is slightly intoxicated, goes home and wonders how the evening got away so fast.

Wait, did I just derail this thread????

WieWaldi

Sophia And to mark a funny comment as "heads up for a funny comment - here is the funny comment - end of funny comment" would, well, instantly take the 'funny' out of the comment 😃

<funny comment on>
really? 🤣
<funny comment off>

Hmm...
Well..
Ok..
I got it.

Player1

I can't see that other website anymore, just the white screen. Which sucks because it means I can't contribute and the recitals will have to be listened to in incognito mode.

Let this be a lesson, all things change and not always for the better.

navindra

bSharp Wow. Is this intentional?

I'm able to repro it with Chrome and Ad Blocker installed. I was trying to figure out what was going on but didn't really get to the bottom of it.

However, what struck me is how completely infested Piano World is now. Almost every single line of code I looked at in the response payload had something to do with ads or tracking. There are too many external iframes, invisible pixels, injected scripts... it's absolutely mind-boggling.

Almost none of the code seemed to have anything to do with rendering Piano World.

I wonder if the Ad Blocker is getting confused — it thinks the main PW site is the ad and ads themselves are the legit site... so Ad Blocker is stripping out PW and leaving the ad code. Might explain what I've been seeing.

Can anyone actually say if the white page is a bug or by design?

Gombessa

navindra I wonder if the Ad Blocker is getting confused — it thinks the main PW site is the ad and ads themselves are the legit site... so Ad Blocker is stripping out PW and leaving the ad code. Might explain what I've been seeing.

I was using an adblocker (Ublock Origin) on PW for a long time, well before the VS acquisition. One thing I noticed is that some of the ads seem to be integrated into the core forum code, and can't be blocked without blocking the entire site. And if individual elements are blocked, they come back sometimes when cycled. I think it's a fairly common ad-blocker response tactic; if the ads are hosted through the same cells/tables as forum content, it's harder to isolate the ads and block only them, without also inadvertently blocking posts/threads/images.

I suspect with the additional ads added by VS, adblocking extensions are over-aggressively capturing much more of the site.

PianoMonk

Blocking ads on PW, or on any site for that matter, is only part of avoiding potential dangers. Without turning this into a seminar on Internet safety and security, if you want to know what kind of information you are giving to every website you visit, go here:
https://www.makeuseof.com/free-tools-test-browser-security/

An older security site, that still might make you think about ever going online again is this:
https://www.grc.com/shieldsup

Both of these sites will also tell you how to address any issues they expose.

WieWaldi

Gombessa Interesting... I set up Ublock origin once. (3¹/₂ yrs ago) and since then the site looks like this:

No ads. Not on top, nor bottom, nor left or right side and most important: not between the posts. All screen is forum content! 😎

navindra

Gombessa One thing I noticed is that some of the ads seem to be integrated into the core forum code, and can't be blocked without blocking the entire site. And if individual elements are blocked, they come back sometimes when cycled. I think it's a fairly common ad-blocker response tactic; if the ads are hosted through the same cells/tables as forum content, it's harder to isolate the ads and block only them, without also inadvertently blocking posts/threads/images.

I think you figured it out. I see the new VS ad(s) in the header and footer.

It's really weird, but I suspect all the historical advertisers such as Modartt are basically getting a free ride at this point. VS are just applying a blunt instrument approach to inject their ads to Piano World without touching the rest of the site.

Gombessa

WieWaldi
Looks like VS has replaced more of the original ads that Frank had--I recall 2 fairly persistent issues that I could never get isolated through Ublock:

There was an ad carousel with box or pillar ads at the footer of the page, if individual ads or the table row they sat in was selected to be blocked, they would occasionally return.
Blocking one or more the ad elements would cause gallery pictures hosted on PW to not show. Refreshing a few times might bring it back, but sometimes you had to unblock to see the hosted images.

It looks like VS replaced #1 with their own banner ad at the bottom, the benefit of that is it's easily blockable 🙂 No idea if #2 is still an issue.

SouthPark

I'm running firefox 115.13.0esr (64-bit) with 'adblocker ultimate' extension. And at the moment - that site does flicker for a split second - as in showing up momentarily. And then it looks like this - permanently.

But that is ok. I like it like that.

WieWaldi

SouthPark I always run multiple browsers on my PC. Firefox is the main browser with all the plugins. Chrome and MS-Edge are my fallback browsers, just in case Firefox+adblockers can't open a site. This happens in 1 out of 15 websites. In this case, I copy&paste the adress bar to Edge and click the box: "No, I don't want to make Edge the default browser. Thank you."
If my other browsers can't open the site, too, then I know the site is broken.

Rubens

I did it without protection. I think I'm gonna get sick. My fault. My parents told me never to do that.

iternabe

There is a more technical but much better way to block ads for the entire home network. If you have an always-on computer (e.g., server, raspberry pi), install pi-hole and use it as the DNS server. Basically, make your router's upstream DNS server point to pi-hole, and make pi-hole's upstream DNS server a trustworthy public one (e.g. openDNS, or Cloudflare). After that, you can download and activate some blocked domain lists (called Gravity list) in pi-hole.

This has been working superbly well for me. There is even an iPhone app that allow me to temporarily disable pi-hole blocking (i.e. for 5 minutes then automatically turn back on again) on the rare occasion that I need to see an ad.

TLH21

Brave has the built in block list that is in pi-hole (apparently, according to my friendly neighbourhood IT guru).

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