today for the first time i noticed ads on the ft site? is there some one to contact for placing an ad?

Over 500 posts in a four month period and you notice the first one today??? And then you want to place one???

correction: untill now i have seen that ad for award planer, but i was told that ft, or rather randy owned that company. today i see ower your student loan, find lost friends ect...

And they BLINK]. I'd rather pay a subscription fee than be subjected to blinking ads, or any ads at all, for that matter. The price of enduring blinking ads adds a substantial cost to readng FT.

Gah!

birdstrike


[This message has been edited by birdstrike (edited 02-06-2003).]

Time to start suppressing internet advertising with the .hosts file.

(Just tried it and it works - wow!)

FewMiles..

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how do i do that?

You can contact [email protected] for advertising iquiries.

I don't care about the ads -- but the blinking ones and the ones with shaking text are QUITE annoying.

I was rather shocked to see the ones asking people to *sell* their FF miles that were up a week or so ago.

First locate your hosts file. it's in different places based on what operating system you are using. For example in XP itus usually in \windows\system32\drivers\etc

(etc is the directory, not for and so on and so on).

In NT is't in the same, but it's usually WINNT and not windows, in 95/98 it's just in Windows. When in doubt, do a search, and file the one under your Windows directory.

The hosts file is a listing of an IP address, the site name, and a description if you want it. When you type in an address, the hosts file will be looked at first, and the IP address there will be used first.

It's just a text file, the only requirement is that the address and and name have to be separated by a few spaces. It's a text file, edit it in notepad or whatever and save it as a text file.

You set things you don't want to see to the IP address of 127.0.0.1, then list the addresses you don't want to see. For example, I've added these four lines to my hosts file:

127.0.0.1 tribalfusion.com
127.0.0.1 a.tribalfusion.com
127.0.0.1 tribalfusion.speedera.net
127.0.0.1 speedera.net
127.0.0.1 spd.atdmt.com


and it's taken care of all the flashing ads all over this place, at least so far. You have to make sure you clear your cache or it won't work, it will get the ad from the cache.


To get the addresses, right click on the banner ads you still get, choose properties, and it will give you the address the image is coming from, you want to add the first domain name to it (after the http:www. and before the next /). Once your cache is cleared, the next time you look for an ad from that particular server, it will go to the hosts file, and bring up nothing.

There are huge lists to add to your hosts file to block every known ad, but here those four work wonders. Samples, information, and the rest over at

http://technoerotica.net/mylog/hostfile.html

and many other places.


(edited to add the at&t site)

[This message has been edited by cordelli (edited 02-07-2003).]

Well I can't complain about the substantial sum I pay to Randy and company for the free use of FT. I often click on banners as that is what banner ads are all about. Takes a few seconds.

The only things that sneak in every 6 months or so are pop ups and I recall reading Randy post that these annoy him as much as anyone else and he instructed his ad vendor to exclude them from FT.

Some complaining seem to have not mentioned that "ads" in the past weeks have often related to a charity, that I assume appreciated the free advertising offered to them.

One highly technical (and zero cost) trick I can suggest to those who are so bothered by these "ads" is to train the brain NOT to look at the top inch of each FT page. Works every time I understand.

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~ Glen ~

Come and visit the most ** FRIENDLY FORUM ** on FlyerTalk. No flame wars, no personal abuse, no substance abuse. Not much of anything really!

AT&T, Classmates, Daytona Beach, etc are not charities, they are annoying ads that are animated, blinking, etc. If they were charities that would be a different story, but since they are so easy to get rid of it's not really a huge deal.

Yeah, that was one of the final straws that caused us to switch to a new ad provider. It was a surprise to us as well...