Do we really need to have the Facebook, Twitter, Google and Stumbleupon links at the top of everything - menu and thread on the site. It appears that it takes about 5 to 8 seconds, after the menu or thread is displayed for the links to get displayed at the top of whatever we are looking at. Seconds which we can’t move the page or do anyting else, seconds that add up to wasted time over time.
While Kalmbach appears to be existing in a happy business niche, this kind of crap is getting on my nerves.
Depending on what OS and browser you are running, you can kill a lot of that junk yourself and not be bothered with their induced slowness and at the same time stop these nosy, intruder/spy/stalkers from watching everything you do (they can still track some things, but it does slow them down!)
IE-11 has a Tracking Protection feature that kills a lot of that trash and I also have installed an “Add-On” from Abine dot com, called “DoNotTrackMe” that also blocks even more of that trackingspying/stalking garbage. There are other Add-ons that do similar things, such as “Ghostery”.
I have noticed that the IE-11 Tracking Protection blocks some embedded links to YouTube (but not all of them) and if someone posts a video, all I get is a blank rectangle with a slashed circle in the upper left corner. It is easy to click on an icon in the toolbar at the top (a blue circle with a slash in it, between the URL text box and the Refresh icon [chasing arrows]) and temporarily disable the blocking if I really think the video is worth my time to watch, and then I can re-enable blocking with the same icon.
I always thought there were laws against Stalking, but apparently the almighty dollar trumps the law.
I think it is horrible how so many of the major internet companies, like Google, are complaining about the NSA spying on people in the name of safety, when those internet companies are MUCH MORE intrusive into our lives in the name of their own profit.
Besides, the NSA is the only branch of government that is listening to the people!
I don’t have that problem either, but at times the yellow banner at the bottom gets in the way of the last line or two of a post; I simply scroll down a little or tell it to go away.
I won’t get involved on any of the social networking sites, but the icons don’t seem to be a problem.
I also have Firefox set to block tracking cookies, and have dumped Google as my default search engine in favor of Duckduck-go. They claim not to track anything you search.
For those who are über paranoid, using Firefox with adblockplus and noscript is always an option. I go even further and have a custom hostname file setup, and custom filtering through using custom DNS through opendns. Yeah it’s overkill but I like it.
I use firefox as well, but I’m too lazy to look up what my settings are, I think I have firefox’s popup blocker turned on, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of, much less installed adblockplus or noscript.
I don’t remember ever seeing facebook, google, etc… links here, so regardless of how greedy Kalmbach may be, at least they don’t seem to be trying to make it incredibly difficult to turn those things off, since apparently I turned them off once upon a time without realizing it.
Isn’t that one of the fun things about computers, that you can touch something that changes your configuration, and even if you notice the change right away often you can’t figure what you did, or how to reverse it?
Speaking of spyware, or directed ads, a while ago I had googled “hobbit jokes”, every link I clicked on had railroad related banner ads. Subsequently another train related website’s banner ads were all for the Hobbit movie. That made me very fearful for the human race’s ability to reproduce. Luckily I had a Klingon Language Institute meeting to go to that helped take my mind off of it.
Several forum software updates back, there was an annoying advertising banner along the right side. The ads would be related to the most popular topics that day. For example, if there was a hot topic about ditch lights, the banners would have ads like “Discover the super cheap light bulbs that the government doesn’t want you to know about”.
The best banner ad was on a day when the hot topics were ditch lights, something that happened in North Dakota, and someone had called someone else the village idiot. The banner ad read: “Click here to find communities of idiots in North Dakota”. [(-D]