I appreciate FT and all the work Randy, et al. put into it. I'm sure I'm completely oblivious to how much time, effort and money (apparently a whole lot) it takes. I understand that I'm a guest and getting a free ride and I am thankful for that.

That being said, how come other huge forum communities don't have to use such horrible ad placements to remain solvent?

The "Ad-block" extension to Firefox, properly used, gets rid of these ads, use it in addition to the customized FT GreaseMonkey extension (which an expert could presumably modify to take care of these ads as well).

I agree with those previous posters who noted that the ads are likely being made more and more obnoxious to pressure people to buy the "ad-free" version of FT when it appears; that is an obvious consequence of the decision to offer a paid version.

I am near computer illiterate but Ryan 182 made a superb suggestion elsewhere that bears repeating. I have XP which I gather is the most used Windows platform:

1. Go to Find - search - and search for "hosts"

2. Click on that file when found, and open that file using notepad

3. When in there, paste these 2 lines to the very end of what comes up:

127.0.0.1 a.tribalfusion.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com

Click "save" then "exit" and re-start computer and no ad of ANY kind appears on FT. No banners, no skyscrapers, no google anything either. ^ ^ ^

No need to load any programs, which when I did that last time, it froze/crashed my set-up.

If I can do it anyone can. Shame it had to come to this, but the new absurb ads inside posts were driving me nuts.

FT'ers are very savvy, and I have not seen one post anywhere, joyous about this new intrusion, the last in a long line of them.

If lots of folks do this, neither the ad agency, nor google nor Randy wins, as the number of folks exposed to the ads shrinks. Oh well.

Well I could try it, but since I'm on a mac, but still a fairly new mac user, I don't think it would work that well

Your hosts file is in the /etc folder in your hard disk. Open it with text editor, add the two lines, save, and you're done.

Can you (or anyone else) give step-by-step instructions for those of us who aren't so Mac-savvy? I am running the latest version of Tiger (10.4.2) but wasn't able to find an etc. folder anywhere on my computer.

Thanks.

this is great advice, thanks. i was willing to put up with the ads up top and in between posts until now, but this latest 'development' is ridiculous.

had the same thought--couldn't help but wonder if that's what this latest 'feature' is designed to do.

I'd love that too-- I can't find the items referenced above.

http://accs-net.com/hosts/hostsformac.html

Here's ONE!

The ad's don't bother me in the least. I for ONE appreciate the costs associated with running FT and do not BEGRUDGE our HOST the ad income.

I'd suggest that anyone who is unhappy with the ad content of FT go join www.moremiles.org. It's pathetic, but ad-free.

Can't claim that I'm overjoyed by them, but much like Camera Guy the ads don't bother me.

I appreciate it-- but I don't have a "hosts" currently and the one they suggest to create did nothing-- I think. Some of us non-tech-weenie Mac users will need a bit more help, I'm afraid.

Ditto.

I think mac OS makes the hosts file hidden, so you could do
ls -a in the /etc directory (you would need to do this from a shell prompt)
there should be a file .hosts or hosts
edit the file in any text editor (vi, pine etc) and add the previously mentioned lines.

I think you are severely misunderestimating just what level of technical stupidity I am confessing to.
I had a Mac before there were Macs (I had a LISA!) And I had a PC before there were PCs (we called them microcomputers) (Ohio Scientific C4P (4K of RAM)) and I had an Apple ][-- (no plus.)

But, I still have no idea how to do what needs to be done here.

I do think that the info here:
http://accs-net.com/hosts/hostsformac.html
is not for OS X.