I’m sorry this is little bit of a rant outside of my normal commentary but I needed a forum to vent my frustration… I hope you will indulge me.
In the last month or two Star Tribune has started employing annoying and invasive ads on their web site. First it was “virus alert” popups that took hold of the web browser and required multiple clicks to get out of and you had to cancel a forced download as well. Today I encountered Showtime popups as well.
I’m a loyal daily reader online and subscribe to the weekend paper as well. If Star Tribune continues to waste my time and patience with these invasive ads I might have to take my reading elsewhere.
I will be calling their customer disservice line on Monday and encourage others to do the same.
Agreed. I gave up o their site and only read it when someone links to something. I’ve probably dropped from ~30 page views per day to 3.
while i hate the Strib’s ads too…
that Virus Alert popup means your browser has been infected with malware… it’s not from the Strib’s site specifically
Jeff,
I have had it happen on several machines and just did a scan with Spybot, AdAware and AVG Antivirus and found no infections… it is a Star Tribune advertiser.
This will get worse before it gets better. The PiPress loves to have the top of the page fold over the copy, but my Mac can’t always close that ad so some days it’s hard to read the PiPress. The Dayton Daily News, however, is the worst. They routinely use ads where people walk across the screen and park in front of the copy you’re trying to read. Worse, the “window close” button for those ads aren’t consistently placed and often move when you try to click them.
Annoying advertising is just another reason why I visit blogs and not newspaper website.
then it’s the Strib’s server that is infected…
it’s a pretty widely spread trojan
I agree with Jeff, it may not be the website. It may mean you have some malware already on your compute. The best thing I can recommend is to get AVG Antivirus. The best part about it is it’s free! They have a free anti-spyware program as well. I’ve paid $60 a year for others that do what this program does for free. If it is malware, AVG will get rid of it for sure.
http://free.avg.com/
The Strib’s ads annoy me to the extent that I new look at the Strib only every day or two rather than attempt to read it daily and be bombarded with irritating ads.