Regarding the "Vampires"...

[Fyron]

But what if I like sucking, huh? Did you ever consider that possibility?

[CEO TROLL]

Oh no don't suck!!!
No don't, stop!!!
No No No don't stop
don't stop!!!

[oleg]

I hate sites that automaticaly reset homepage. Yes, there are such suckers.. It even forced me to setup my "homepage" to "blank". It seems to stop all automatical changes to my browser.

[DirectorTsaarx]

Fortunately, I didn't notice the pop-ups that y'all did; either because I'm so used to them by now (I read about a dozen different webcomics a day, and a couple of them rely heavily on pop-ups to stay free), or because my corporate firewall blocked the most heinous. I also am in the habit of looking to see what a link says before I click, a habit I picked up in the days of using unstable browsers that would lock up on certain sites (particularly ones with lots of pop-ups, BTW; Netscape 4.x was really bad about that, to the point where I've accepted IE as my browser...). Having said that, I'm glad the vampire links are being discontinued here, and that everyone (on both sides) is being gracious about it. I have no idea how this community has stayed so civil this long; most web communities seem to break down quite quickly...

Anyway, for those of you who want a ray of hope, [shameless plug] Earthlink has good spam & popup controls. I've been using both for a while, and it's drastically cut down on the popup ads at home (not to mention the various popunder & respawning windows from more annoying sites); the service also lets you know a popup was blocked by changing the cursor image briefly. That's particularly useful when you WANT a popup window (like when using the "preview post" button on this message board), and the cursor change is a signal to override the popup control briefly. And their "spaminator" service keeps the alleged spam for a couple weeks; if you're concerned that you missed an e-mail you can access the list of blocked Messages via web and verify whether it should be deleted. My e-mail box at home is much happier. Too bad I'm still getting 5-10 spams a day at work...
[/shameless plug]

[Pax]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
I never even realized that there were pop-ups on that site, since all pop-up ads get blocked before they reach me.

Actually, I got NO popups when you sent ME there from IRC, Fyron. Not a single one,a dn I don't HAVE a popup blocker; that would explain your not knowing there were any.

They were added AFTER the fact, I think -- tricky ploy by the site operator(s), I bet ... get people interested and having fun, THEN turn on the pop-up-hell faucet.

It's possible at least -some- of those popups are the result of the redirect (for which I must admit partial culpability, I did suggest using that trick to hide the nature of the link). I never did go there through -that- method.

[Fyron]

Actually, there aren't any ads from my site at spaceports. So the redirect couldn't have been the cause of the pop-ups.