ha ha ha, not again, :) POP UP ADS Yea !

oh yeah, again

pop up ad - pop up ad - pop up ad

ha ha

 

I have a sudden urge to enroll in Bay Path College

 

See, this is our new saturation marketing program that we offer selected schools. We guarantee that every degreeinfo member will know the name of their school

... actually it's a bug in the text linker that interprets an extra comma at the end of the keyword list as "put a link in after every space between a word." We are pretty careful, and now we know what's happening, we can usually catch it within a few minutes if it happens and we don't notice while inputting.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

 

Yes, and, even better, I could tell it to ignore keywords shorter than 3 characters, or ignore commas at the end of the keyword list (which is what causes the problem). We probably will at some point but there's so much other stuff in our developer's queue right now that I've not wanted to distract him with this.

The person responsible for the 3+ day problem is no longer working for us, so that won't be happening again, and we've instituted new procedures to (hopefully) safeguard against such situations in the future.

 

Funny, I'm on here every day and I never saw the problem on my Mac.

 

the 3 day problem happened from about june 13-15th.

The problem today was only a few minutes.

Your Mac should be able to see the highlighted (underlined) schools that are DegreeInfo sponsors; if you can't, let me know because that means there's a problem with our linker. If you can see the underlined schools, you *definitely* would have seen the problem when the linker went crazy

 

I have a Mac, the school sponsors definitely show up.

 

You might not understand how expensive it is to keep something like this board going. When you deal with as many page views as DegreeInfo, the bandwidth costs are very high. I can understand your annoyance with the ads, especially the adds that go haywire, but you can't expect Chip to keep this board going for free. Ads are the only way to make money at something like this. I doubt that anyone is making it rich here.

 

No, I recently wrote the software I have named Linkerblocker (patent pending) and I am immune to your dastardly links. (All lies!)

 

I have no problem with ads, but this was a huge bug

There were no spaces between words. Instead there were blue boxes.

That by itself made the posts a little difficult to read, but the worst was moving your mouse anywhere over the post caused lots of ads to pop up becasue every blue box between every word was a link to a pop up ad

these ads were triggered by a mouseover event so you didn't even have to click on the links to get the pop ups

the board was pretty much unreadable for 3 days

people had to resort to bbcode tricks to stop the ads from being in thier posts

 

Yea, I agree, it's really annoying. Drives me nuts, in fact. Chip hates it too because it makes the members angry.

 

Yes, I'm aware.

Yes, I'm aware.

Yes, I'm aware.

Yes, I'm aware. It happened the first time in 5+ years that I have been away from a Net connection for more than 24 hours. I apologized for it, the person responsible for the mistake is no longer with the organization, and we have since, as I said above, taken steps to ensure that a repeat of that event does not happen.

Outside of that, I can offer you a 100% refund of all the fees you've paid to DegreeInfo to use our site over the past whatever time period you've been using it.

 

I think these small mistakes help reinforce how unobtrusive the very little advertising on here normally is. With some sites that provide education information it's difficult to figure out where the ads end and the content begins. As someone who has been mostly a lurker over the years I'd like to thank the administrators, moderators, and other posters for making this a very valuable place to find information. I would pay at least double for this service .

 

What's that old song? "Nothin from nothin leaves nothin".

You make a great point. It's a point I was trying to make to the OP and might have come out as a little rude on my part. Sorry OP. The fact is, nobody pays a dime to use this great service where the ads are unobtrusive. We don't have a right to get upset if things accidentally go wrong occasionally. No disrespect to the OP intended.

 

Very cute. Please send your check to me.

 

To be fair, there will be some more advertising added, but one of the things we're working really hard on is making the advertising relevant and context sensitive to what's being discussed, and it's my hope that the ads displayed will be ones that we develop the creatives so you don't have an obnoxiously distracting mismash of banners.

We'll probably also eventually offer some form of very reasonably priced way to avoid all of the advertising.

And... we're working on a content section that will have worthwhile, in-depth articles and information rather than the typical pithy articles you see on so many other sites.

It all takes time (and money) but I think and hope that as people start to see more of the changes, they'll see some real benefit to what we are doing.