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TTAG has one central ad supplier: medialodge.com. We have a multi-year deal with them and it’s that ad revenue that allows us to pay our writers and bring you the content you want at no cost to you. That said, one of their ad partners has an entirely regrettable tendency to feed the site with ads that auto-play audio. We know that’s a BIG no-no. In fact . . .

Nick’s research into our demographics reveals that a huge percentage of our readers visit the site from their workplace. If an ad starts blaring, it signals our readers’ overlords that their employees are being less than entirely productive (in terms of their gainful employment).

Rest assured that TTAG has a strict no-auto-play audio ads policy for ALL our advertisers. Still, sometimes auto-plays sneak through the filters and make it onto the page. The supplier say oops and kills the ad(s). To quote Kurt Vonnegut, so it goes.

But we know it shouldn’t go that way. And we apologize for those times when it does. If you could cut us some slack on this auto-play annoyance and email a screen cap to [email protected] when it happens (along with the URL, if you can) – we would really appreciate it.

TTAG uses 100 percent of its income to generate content. If our advertisers get eyeballs, we get income which keeps the content machine humming along. So, we appreciate your support our insane practice of posting as often as 14 times a day on a regular basis (and turning off your ad blocker would help, too). Oh and one more thing . . .

We’re reinventing the website. Well, developing an alternative site. I can’t tell you any more about it save this: it will be a lot less likely to feed you content – editorial or advertising – that you don’t want. And a lot more likely to feed you content you will absolutely adore (darling). Watch this space. Please?

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105 COMMENTS

      • You have to remember the ads are specific to users, so they could be viewing the page constantly and not get any of the audio ads.

        • download ghostery. it will block all of these ads, and make the site run much more quickly.

          most importantly, ghostery blocks all of the trackers and cookies that get collected off you. no more allowing axciom to figure out exactly who you are based on what sites you visit.

          less people and computers figuring out who i am, the better 🙂

    • Really? I use an add blocker (google addblock plus, free, 5 second install). All I see is texas festival stuff on the right.

      I’m not going to stop because I have a 10″ subwoofer and 4 mid woofers on this gaming rig. No one should tolerate neighbors getting pissed at you or getting fired so I encourage other readers to install ABP.

      Going with sleezy advertisers who pay the most is shooting yourself in the foot ttag… either we won’t come here or we’ll get an add server blocker.

    • For all those who suggest Ad block or script blocker or headphones, I say why should you have to do that? When you type in your helpful hints do you ever ask yourself why the ad blockers are free? You don’t really think your getting something for nothing do you? Why should anyone have to do a workaround for normal browsing? Why is this site one of maybe two or three that are this bad. I say it’s high time we got some feedback on the matter and it’s late getting things corrected. Your honor is in your words. Let’s see.

  1. Wait, there aren’t supposed to be auto-play ads? They’re on every single TTAG page I open, they might delay their start, but they’re always there.

  2. The autoplay ads don’t give me much grief, I just mute my PC. One thing that is extremely frustrating is something in the ads or on the page that will not let me scroll down to read the content. The recent posting on the Glock 43 was terrible…..I scroll down to read the article, and the page jumps back up toward the top, bet it did this 7 or 8 times. See if some of your ads have anchors or something that prevent scrolling beyond them.

    • This has been happening a lot for me. I have flash blocked, but lots of annoying stuff still happens. I turned of auto-reloading but that happens anyway also.

        • I run Adblock Plus and flash block with the Chrome browser. I have no problems from my desktop or laptop. On my tablet and phone I used Adblock, but it won’t work unless it’s on a wifi connection.

    • Yeah we have adblock. But I habitually mute sound unless I want to hear something. At least I was able to post during my abortive effort win my gun LOL…

  3. My guess is this “alternative” site he mentioned is a pay content site. Hopefully I’m wrong, but…

      • I don’t know if TTAG has the reader base (or frankly the ease of commenting, or the fact that they are 12 years too late) to pull of the Fark/TotalFark model, but they may be about to give it a shot.

        There’s just not enough content in general, and the fact is more than half of that content is now- to reverse a different website’s motto; Politics Not Guns.

        I understand that TTAG needs to keep readership up to put eyeballs on pages, but the incredibly shitty ads and the content pandering to the far right with your snippy headlines and condescending content… Who are you trying to convince? Who are you trying to convert?

        When I first started getting in to guns as a sport and a lifestyle- after having never grown up with them- this was one of the most important parts of that transformation. The reviews were so damn honest and the commentary spoke to me as a MOR guy.

        Now? You’re pissed at Remington and they’re pissed at you, and the articles are about the politics of politics and how it relates to your brand of… political shit pudding.

        It’s crap and hey, maybe it means what it is possible to learn from you, I’ve learned, but I really don’t think so.

        • Can you blame them? After the democrats behavior over the past 6 years? If you can’t see the writing on the wall by now, good God. Go ahead and vote democrat… see what happens to your guns.

        • Swarf has a strong point. The name of your site is now misleading because truth indicates some objectivity. You could now call your site something with the words ‘FoxNews’ and ‘republican’ in it. People are not going to change their view because they read an article. Most of the people read this because they believe the same thing about 2A rights.

          As far as the crappy ads – I’m using a Chromebook and this site is so obnoxiously overloaded it takes several seconds to load (even while sitting next to the router). Concealednation.org is a bit better with loading speed and they usually repost your good content. Maybe I’ll just read TTAG less and concealednation.org more until you get a subscription function without all the junk cluttering the screen.

        • @ CMM It’s hard to be “objective” without being disingenuous if it’s constantly the left or Democrats that constantly hammer 2a rights. No point in dwelling in the truth if you don’t want to get hurt a couple of times.

    • Ad views don’t pay that well without a click through. Generating the equivalent revenue from a subscription wouldn’t cost too much.

    • “My guess is this “alternative” site he mentioned is a pay content site.”

      If it’s a model where authors are paid by page views that would motivate good writers to up their output.

      I’d be cool with 5 clams a month.

      More than that, not so much…

  4. I use Adblock plus and the only site I’ve got white listed to send me ads is thetruthaboutguns.

    Your ads are not intrusive and I want to incent you to keep it that way.

    • Agreed,

      This site carries some of the less intrusive ad programming being pushed onto it’s viewers. Keep the income flow running.

  5. I check in from work regularly.

    Every IT machine I am aware of has a control called “Mute” and “Volume” or plug in speakers that can either be unplugged or controlled by their On/Off and volume controls.

    Then there is always the option of using a headset.

    So what exactly is the issue again??? Have we become *that* helpless and sensitive?

    Jeez.

    • Volume control is too high-tech for lots of people.
      I recall being at a conference and the presenters laptop must have been loaded with malware. About 10 minutes in some porno sounds were blaring over the speakers. No video, just sounds. The slides didnt require sound at all so muting the machine would have saved a lot of embarssment.
      All my gadgets, phone included, live in a state of perpetual mute unless I explicitly need audio at a given moment then they go right back onto mute. Work machines don’t even have speakers and audio is disabled in device manager.

      Too often people let the machines do all the driving then act offended and enraged when they take a wrong turn.

      Folks need to grab their computer/tablet/phone by the throat and make it their bitch.

      • Exactly.

        If in doubt, ask a friend or associate.

        If you can’t do that for whatever reason, Google [or whatever search engine you prefer] is a *very* good friend.

      • “Folks need to grab their computer/tablet/phone by the throat and make it their bitch.”

        *Fist-Bump*

    • So what exactly is the issue again??? Have we become *that* helpless and sensitive?

      The issue for some is that the ads make the site malfunction and/or run so slowly as to be painful to use and/or suck down bandwidth (or data allowance) pointlessly.

      • Actually, this is the problem which eventually drove me to AdBlock, I keep the audio turned off, and don’t mind ads which do not intrude on subject matter, but the site kept locking my computer up completely, with a restart the only solution. With AdBlock that is all gone. I might be open to a pay site, but I think that would be counterproductive to the site’s stated goals.

        • When I *can* use AdBlock, I do. I can’t always, and many others are in the situation of not being able to use it at all.

          It doesn’t help TTAG out when we do so, but it’s so intolerably bad when we don’t. TTAG would be best served by a company that just has inline graphic ads with No.Autoplay.Videos.Whatsoever. People would be able to tolerate the ads then, and TTAG would make some money. As it is, they are driving people into the position of deliberately denying them ad revenue.

        • Nailed it.

          I finally installed ghostery only because the ads were bogging the site down so badly it was near unusable. Some days it was so bad I couldn’t type in the “post reply” window without a 15-20 second delay in the dialog box.

          As much as I have bitched about it over the years, I avoided installing an ad blocker for as long as I could and a part of me is sorry for the revenue loss as a result. That said, I had no idea so many of us had done this, and if it’s that consistently a problem for the customer base then the fault likely lies elsewhere.

    • I know this will be a stunner to you, but not all people use their computers the same way that you do, in the same environments that you do, with the same sensitivities to things that you have. Shockingly, your solution may not be universally applicable.

      Actually, I listen to music on my computer, in the background. I also have the sound on for little alerts (like messaging and stuff). You might be amazed to discover how different things pump a different volume of sound through your system to where there’s a balance between the volume for the source, and the volume for the machine.

      But the ads, their volume is not settable. Their volume is set to “11”. So, I can be doing something, with my quiet music on, etc., and then some ad comes blaring out. Others have performance issues, unrelated to sound, or bandwidth issues that they’d rather not worry about.

      Whatever policy TTAG has with these ads is apparently not working, since the ads “sneak through” anyway, with apparent consistency, and with no recourse. Hell, TTAG publishes auto play videos themselves at times, consciously, and they’re supposed to know better.

      So, folks have to go scorched earth and simply blacklist everything on the site. Because we can. And TTAG suffers for it.

      Mute button, or no.

      • One alternative is available to TTAG: check out https://adblockplus.org/en/acceptable-ads; Most people will have the default behavior set, which will allow acceptable ads. If TTAG can manage to get a handle on their ad source (or switch to one that serves up acceptable ads), then they could easily get ads that most of us could see, without most of us having to resort to total cut-off.

  6. Agreed on autoplay ads. I block Flash, which tends to do the trick, while still letting image-based ads display.

    The biggest annoyance, in fact a showstopper on mobile, is the browser-hijack ads that redirect to GooglePlay. I know that you’re also working on that issue when it crops up. I thought I’d throw out a reminder to readers to send a similar email when it happens.

      • I hesitate to say anything, but that hasn’t happened to me at TTAG so far on iOS. When it happens, it’s usually a sketchier site. If it had happened here on one of my early visits, I probably wouldn’t have come back.

  7. I’m surprised the firearms/outdoors industry has not approached TTAG with requests for advertisement. I am much more likely to click on an ad featuring some new optic for my rifle, a newly designed AR magazine, or hunting/camping gear than the present ads. This is TTAG after all. I’m just not interested in:

    –> Is this stock a royal flush?
    –> A very smart trick to pay of your mortgage.
    –> 87 Yr old trainer shares secret to losing weight
    –> #1 Worst food that makes you fatter
    –> Call 24/7 Suicide prevention lifeline
    –> Contour from Cox – Order now

    • TTAG definitely has some of the least-targeted advertising on any website I visit. It’s 95% just click-bait garbage, like “17 Celebrity Genital Birthmarks You Won’t Believe!”, which seems strange to me, given the laser-like focus of the content here. Seems like a no-brainer to have more content-appropriate ads.

      But then, I suppose taking ad money from gun companies would open TTAG up to the kind of pay-to-play bullshit and accusations of bias that have turned the print gun magazine industry into the joke that it is today, so that’s a whole other problem.

      Maybe TTAG just needs a billionaire sugar daddy to pay the bills. An Anti-Bloomberg, if you will…

    • Why not AMMO sites? It’s a gun blog, right? Accessories, even knives. Divorce lawyers or whatever, meh.

  8. I keep the work machine on mute anyway, but what annoyed the hell out of me was the auto-scroll back up to the video playing. It made entire articles unreadable–and made me hostile to the ad subject, namely AT&T.

  9. It does seem to have been a while since I’ve seen the dog and cat, surfer, skier, or garish fashion model ads. Those were a huge bandwidth suck, and every time they re-played, more memory would leak until eventually my machine would slow to a crawl. Sure, they could be paused… but then, when I would write a reply to someone, the page reloads. Then when I post it, the page reloads. Scrolling back to the top every time to hit pause was getting REALLY old, especially on long threads. I hope that company paid you a zillion dollars to have me ignore (and curse) the same four stupid fvcking ads over and over. Whatever it is that autoplays now can’t be stopped but seems to be less obnoxious (with the speakers turned off of course); still, it’s a bit of a pain. Bandwidth is EXTREMELY limited here and the page is liable to freeze up while the wonderful “content” loads. 90 percent of it is Ad Crap.

    And (oh yeah) before some clown advertises AdBlockPlus in condescending “you’re an idiot” tones, I *don’t* have that degree of authority over this machine, so save your keystrokes.

    • You may be able to use a portable browser. Requires no installation. Then add adblockplus to that portable browser.
      portableapps.com

      Students and employees get around administrator blocks with portable apps all the time.

      • Can’t even do that much. It’s impossible to plug any media into the computer. Security, don’tcha know.

        • IE, no USB on those machines?

          Can you VPN or equiv. to your home IP? ‘Seeing’ TTAG via your home machine?

        • Well, one can physically stick a thumb drive into the USB port, or put a CD in the tray… but the computer is locked down and won’t “see” what you did.

  10. “…and turning off your ad blocker would help, too..”

    I would, but then the site is dang-near useless. Everything slows to a crawl, there’s weird scrolling behavior, etc, etc. Every couple weeks or so I turn it off to see if the ads have gotten less irritating, but it doesn’t take long before I’m driven back to the refuge of Adblock Plus. I’m also not a real big fan of the almost two-dozen trackers that Ghostery reports on TTAG when I disable Adblock.

    I get that it ain’t cheap to run a site like this, but there’s got to be a better way to balance ad revenue with a quality end-user experience.

    • The more obnoxious they make their ads, the more starsystems will slip through their fingers…

      or something like that.

    • The scrolling behavior is the biggest problem for me. My work’s firewall kills the video ads dead, but it doesn’t keep weird scripts from making the window behave poorly.

    • I don’t know anything about how to set up a site like this, nor do I want to, but is there a split screen available? Pay so much a month, then all you get is TTAG content or ads from sources you specify, be it gay rights or ammo sales?

  11. I would like to display ads, even click a few to help the site out. But when I turn ad-block off, the audio/video ads, and other badly designed ads slow the page WAY down, and make viewing the site a pain. Until you get it smoothed out, I’ll likely keep blocking them. 🙁

    • Yes, let me go on the record as saying the display ads, even though most are irrelevant, don’t bother me. (Heck, sometimes they have cuties in them, though I don’t click on them even then.)

  12. Since we are on the topic of housecleaning . . .

    There is a re-occurring glitch where if you have more than one video embedded then the video pic of the start of a certain vid will jump down to another. Kind of heard to explain but basically the embedded videos get mixed up. I am not running anything weird. Just Chrome w/ minimal extensions.

    • I see that, too, using Firefox. It appears to be some kind of caching issue, because a full refresh (hold down shift and click the refresh button) fixes it.

  13. I am on IE at work and Firefox at home. I mute the speakers and disable flash on both computers and don’t have many problems. More difficult on mobile devices but I don’t get much in the way of hijacks or problems that I cannot get out of with one keystroke or at worst a reload of the page. Some ISP home pages and definitely the HuPo are much worse. At least here the content is usually worth reading.

  14. Some of us like to listen to music from our PC’s while we’re catching up on TTAG in the evening. Muting or turning down the volume isn’t a “fix” for us. Moving on is…

  15. I love auto play ads! I love popunders! *robot hands* I need to know what he found under the floor!!! I need to know the best my a simple crazy insane trick!! *bleet blort*. Feed me pain that needs my money!!

  16. I never see any ads, and only had one problem with an auto-play in one article, since I use the blockers, Ghostery and so forth. I would make an effort to turn off the ad block now and again to view the offerings if I knew there was some likelihood of seeing anything even half way interesting. And yes, at a gun blog, that means things related to guns and gear, even hunting and fishing stuff. Maybe stretch it out to camping things.

    Will watch patiently for more info on the new site.

  17. Hi, I used to read every article of TTAG, now I only read about 20-25% of them and the reasons why have been stated in many of the comments above. I can only have one TTAG tab open at a time and I just about forget to watch the videos on this site. With multiple tabs open (number doesn’t matter) if I open just one TTAG tab my pc crawls and just about locks up. Then when I close the TTAG tab everythings back to normal. As a matter of fact I can barely write this comment because of all the lag. If this was a gaming site I’d quit because I’d be getting my ass kicked all the time! I understand the need for revenue. But how about half as many ads, so I/we can view twice+ as many articles! THX

  18. I use an iPad for the majority of my computer work.
    Not sure what you’re referring to. Lucky for me!

  19. Auto-play sucks, the banner ads don’t really bother me. I’ll embarrassingly admit that I click on some of the “link to” stories. I get a sophomoric laugh out of “17 Prop Pics You Won’t Believe”, etc.

  20. at least 2 websites have figured out how to override both Volume & Mute. turn it down, disable it, next thing you know BUY OUR STUFF! YOU CAN”T LIVE WITHOUT OUR STUFF!”

    which is why I have a headphone jack taped to my mouse cable, so I can disable sound throuigh hardware, without relying on software.

  21. My problem with the auto play ads is that I’m trying to watch a video in a post and the ad starts and I have a conflict. If they are there when I’m just reading posts I mute the audio immediately.

    On the teaser so we’re going to have Kirsten….on a regular basis, where has she been?

  22. “and it’s that ad revenue that allows us to pay our writers and bring you the content you want at no cost to you.”

    At no cost to you except massive gobs of CPU and memory utilization. This is one of the only sites that slows my aging PC to a crawl with trackers and javascripts. It was this site that led me to install Firefox addons to help regain control of my browsers responsiveness. Though it hasn’t seemed as bad recently, I seem to recall visits to this blog where Ghostery showed something like 24 trackers and numerous scripts at once, compounded by having a few tabs open.

      • try turning off ghostery, they pile on when not being blocked.. i got 19 with it on, but if turned off, this page alone had 55…. and yes.. the slowness

  23. I have tried about everything I can think of, but TTAG crashes my browsers (yes, browsers: I try 3 some days) more than any site I visit. Twice during this attempt to post this response. Too many adds? Too many videos? I don’t know. What I do know is I come to TTAG every day, and sometimes more. What does this prove? I am a gun “NUT”.

  24. I keep he sound muted so I hadn’t noticed the auto play. Is that the reason I 11 crashes and restarts every 2-3 minutes when TTAG is open?

  25. This entire site is horrible. Ads, crashing shockwave, which is a ad issue, and pages being slower than a retard tkaing a trig exam. Get it sorted out, quick.

    Also another thing. Im getting goddamned tired of websites needing 8 gb of ram and 50 mb/s of internet speed to run right. Bullshit. Keep it simple and easy so that if you get over 50 comments, you are not fighting your internet browser. The fvcking egghead “geniuses” in internetland seem to have not been able to figure this out.

    Getting tired of it. Posting this rsponse was nothing less than a herculean feat. And its not my computer, I’ve tried two different ones on two different internet providers. thats a clue…

  26. I got adblock because of all of the delayed auto play ads and the ones that kept me from being able to read the article. I would totally uninstall it from my browser to support this site if nothing else if you could pinky promise no autoplay ads. Like every single click through on an article started an autoplay, and sometimes the home page couldn’t help itself either.

    • And as for the “mute your computer” or “volume” things. Some of us are allowed to stream music at work, so having nice soft pandora and then HI I AM AN AUTOPLAY AD AT A MUCH HIGHER VOLUME is no bueno.

  27. I will watch this space, and will continue watching. TTAG is the first website I visit every day, and I read every…single…article. And most of the comments, too.

    I can’t make any promises about letting go of Adblock, but for you all, I’ll keep the possibility open.

  28. Once TAG puts back relevant ads on the site I will consider turning my ad blocker off. I would really prefer to unblock the site, but the current ads are beyond obnoxious. With all the auto playing audio, scrolling issues and browser hijacks, it is unusable with out blocking half the time. If there were relevant ads, I would probably even click on a few of them. Please let all of us ad-blockers know once you get a more stable/more relevant ads so we can start bringing you more ad revenue by white listing your site. I have thefirearmblog.com white listed since their ads are relevant and not annoying.

  29. Ha I didn’t even know what ‘ad block’ was till I came here, I never needed it and I never thought about it. I run the hell out of it now

  30. It’s not just the ad sounds that are annoying. This website, and ONLY this website out of the dozens I visit daily, drags my Chrome browser to a standstill when trying to type comments. All the while the “loading” icon never stops at the top of the browser, and I see the browser telling me at the bottom it is processing requests from several different advertisers websites…over…and over. And then eventually Shockwave Flash will crash and the page locks up.

    I am only able to post here by closing the browser, opening a Safari browser and using that. I much prefer Chrome for a variety of reasons, but I can’t use it here. Chrome is supposedly up to date. I have 8 gigs of RAM and a 2.3Ghz Intel Core i5 processor. Not the fastest machine around, but it eats up most content-heavy sites with no issues or delays. Only TTAG makes it crap the bed, so to speak.

    So I am glad a new website is on the way. Hopefully it will run smoother for me and I won’t have to shlep over to Safari every time i want to visit.

    • Say, are you one of the 72 Virginians promised to islamist nutbars who blow themselves up, or whatever? If so, can you explain exactly what those dead and mutilated assholes can expect during your eternity of “service” to them?

  31. And for a month in MY location (Oregon) the autoplay ads have been anti-gun crap supporting SB941!!

    Can you believe that? Anti-gun auto-play ads on TTAG?!?!?

    • On the plus side, those pukes are helping to pay for this site and getting NO benefit in return…no one here is going to do what those shites want.

  32. It’s not just the autoplay, as annoying as that is. There are so many ads with video based content downloading that it slows down my computer’s response time. It’s getting so obtrusive that I’m just not even reading the posts unless there is something particularly interesting. Even now, after reading this post and composing this reply (about 10-12 minutes) the downloading of ad content continues. So tell your advertisers that not only are you losing eyeball time, their ads aren’t even fully deploying before I’m moving on to something else.
    There goes another “Processing request…”…

    • It’s not that things are loading fully, it’s that the pages auo-reload the content. Likely a ploy to get the ad view counts up.

  33. 95% of the time I view your site from Facebook on my iPhone. Never seen any ad’s, pop up or otherwise. Didn’t realize this was such a problem. So, for me I would probably not stay with you if you go to a pay wall. Sorry. I enjoy most of the content, but it would not be in the budget to pay monthly for it. Just my 2cents, and I clearly seam to be in the minority.

  34. I use an iPhone and no ad-blocking apps. I have NEVER had an a video or audio file on here play without my prompting it. I have no clue what the hell everyone else’s problem is.

    And I would never dream of trying to access this site on a work PC when I have my phone in my pocket. Many companies I’ve worked for have blocking software that treats gun sites the same as porn sites.

  35. The issue has to do with credibility as much as annoyance.

    Seriously, this has been identified as an “internet worst practice” for over a decade (when I was designing websites).

    Any time a website plays audio or video automatically, it screams amateur. This issue hurts the credibility of TTAG.

  36. It’s worth looking into other means of revenue. Google ads use the info on the page to display content relevant ads, for example.

    The biggest annoyance is the irrelevant stupid ads, things for celebrities or car insurance tricks. People can tolerate ads if they’re relevant and don’t autoplay.

  37. RF,

    If the other comments here haven’t made it clear:

    It’s not that “autoplay” gets through only sometimes. If you believe that, your advertising “partner” is selling you a bill of goods. The “partner” is utterly lacking in honesty and is telling you one of the biggest lies since the Clinton administration.

    Autoplay videos are here EVERY. FRICKING. TIME. There IS NO TIME that there isn’t an Autoplay Video.

    If “No autoplay” is part of your agreement with these turds, you have every justification for terminating your contract with them, because they breach it EVERY GODDAMNED DAY.

    Is this perfectly clear now?

  38. I know the autoplay adds have had me rush to close an article on TTAG before due to work needs. For those who are ok with turning off the sound. That doesn’t work for us who have audio alert systems that actually need to heard for said work.

  39. Your actual website is garbage.

    The content is fantastic, but the site itself is one of the worst I ever deal with. Because of some flash or other software you use, it drives Mac computers crazy, makes their fans rev up, over heat, and eventually freeze the browser software. I’m on my third Mac and it did that to all of them.

    Add to that now these terrible autoplay ads and I would almost think Shannon Watts is the one who owns TTAG.

  40. I’ve switched to uBlock the last couple weeks here on Chrome. It seems to be a bit better performing over Adblock, though it doesn’t have the permission setting for “approved” ads to get through.

    Personally, I like to whitelist my favorite sites to support them. However, I can’t do that at the price of killing system performance or swamping myself with tracking cookies, etc.

  41. Even with adblock running this site does things I don’t put up with anywhere else. The big one is that when I click to post a response, the page jumps up and down as it goes through all the links it has in the lineup. And not infrequently, while I wait the fifteen seconds for the screen to behave so I can type, my security software jumps in to block the site because something in one of those links tried to grab my phone number or address or other personal data off my computer. I don’t always catch it, but the times I have it’s looked like some ad site trying to track my preferences (which are easy: don’t track me! is my preference).

    I would love to see the right hand side of the screen, which is now mostly blank as a discussion develops, give simple informative ads that would be helpful — ammo, targets, ranges near me, holsters, a good gun belt…. But stuff that slows a site down is the biggest reason I have locked out a number of sites I would otherwise love.

    Ads on a shooting site should be like the activities at the range. I don’t want noisy, colorful, active distractions when I’m thinking about the target (unless that’s the point of the exercise), and I don’t want such things here, either. So I run adblock, knowing I’m missing some good stuff, but more than happy to miss it so I can pay attention to the site.

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