An Open Letter to Webmasters
Dear Self-Defeating Fools,
You’re out of control, and it’s got to stop. You think you’re helping us. You think you’re helping your employers. Of course, what you’re actually doing as annoying us all to hell and making us hate your employer. Just because you can do a thing, doesn’t mean you should. Allow me to give you three examples.
Let a hyperlink be a hyperlink. When I want a link to open in a new window, I know the key combination to make that happen. When I want a link to open in a new tab, I know the key combination to make that happen, too. And when I want a link simply to take me to the got-dam link, I want it to do just that thing. Your tricky little HTML code to make my browser behave the way you want it to, just makes me hate your site. Mmkay?
Oh, and that goes double for Flash-based sites, where Whomever only knows what will happen at any given moment. Stop it.
Get out of my clipboard. Let me repeat that: Get out of my clipboard. Don’t put things in there I didn’t highlight myself. I’m talking to you, Politico. Want to know why I almost never quote Politico stories anymore? Look at this screencap from a Politico story, and take note of the highlighted text:
The highlighted text is what I expect to find when I paste. But take a look at what Politico’s idiot/rude/stupid/abusive webmaster has done:
That’s right — they’ve put an effing advertisement, and a working link, in my clipboard. Of course, the link doesn’t work as-is, when I post the text to VodkaPundit. So even if by some stupid chance I did want their ad, it doesn’t do me (or Politico) any good. So, every time I post text from Politico, they force me to delete a bunch of extraneous stuff.
In short, Politico’s idiot/rude/stupid/abusive webmaster makes it more difficult for me to send him traffic. Or as we call traffic here on the innerwebs: Money. So I don’t do it anymore, unless I absolutely must. Which is near-never.
Finally, get over the whole hover-command thing for ads/Diggs/Tweets/menus/etc. If I don’t click it, it shouldn’t pop up — just like every single other thing on my computer has behaved for almost 20 years. And if I didn’t click it, I certainly shouldn’t have to click it to make it go away. I’m sick and tired of having to spend half my time worried about where my cursor is, when all I’m trying to do is scroll down your page. And if I’m scrolling down your page, it’s to see if I want to quote it, and send traffic your way. Don’t make it a pain-in-the-rear for me to send you money. Dig?
Most of the smarter webmasters finally gave up on popover, popunder and click-the-monkey trickery. Now it’s time for you to give up on the rest.
Yours,
-Steve.
PS Bit.ly, this all goes triple for you — you suck now. I’m taking my business elsewhere.
And the intellitext thingies too. Especially the ones that don’t let you opt out. I’m looking at you, Yahoo.
It’s a pain to have to have adblocker block all that crap.
LOL You described my gripes with websites far more concisely than I ever could, especially the hover-over part. Now by reflex, when I open a site, I ram my cursor over to the side of the page so popups don’t, well, pop up.
I suspect my friend Cheney W. Halliburton’s current secret project is to dig and build a Tenth Level of Hell for webmasters that overuse/improperly use Flash.
If so, I hope he builds it big.
Nail. Head.
ouch.
(sorry, I couldn’t resist it.) But Stephen is right on in this post. Maybe an hour after I first saw it, my wife pointed out a blog posting somewhere reminiscing over the way things looked in 1998. Multiple fonts, “free” hosting with popups and banners, Under Construction graphics, etc., etc. Hopefully things have gotten better.
John
Hehehehehe… what I meant was that Stephen had hit the nail right on the head. I just use that shorthand occasionally.
Yes. Yes. Yes!!!
Stop trying to route around the web!
Also, if you make me enter my birthday and zip code before opening a page, I will always tell you I was born in 1902 and am a female living in the hills of West Virgina.
And, just put the whole darn story on one page. 8 pages, each with 3 parapgraghs, doesn’t make me want to click on a single ad. It just makes me never want to see you site again.
Hmm. Is there a book on ‘net etiquette for webmasters? If not, there should be. At the very least, it would make for a rockin’ series of articles.
Auto-expanding ads are my pet peeve. And the pages that “allow” you to click to skip the fullpage ad. Eff me ’til I die. Please.
I get ads. Really. They serve their purpose. But if you make them too intrusive, then I’m sure as hell not going to click through. And if they’re really a pain in the ass, then you’ll lose my business for good.
Amen! Preach it, Brother!
Yes, yes, YES!!! That junk drives me totally librarian-poo! Not to mention, do we really need a dozen different social-network link methods for every post?
I do feel bad about links that open in a new window, and use that myself those rare times I actually blog. I just like it that way. Didn’t figure it would upset folks. Sorry Stephen.
Um, rbj, to which intellitext thingies do you refer? But then about the only time I come anywhere near Yahoo is there movies site.
NukemHill, I would say this stuff is more for a style book, not ‘netiquette.
Oh, speaking of flash, I HATE those ads you can’t turn off! Not to mention the sound widgets that come on automatically when the page loads, and there’s no onscreen control to kill it. Like I need to hear a cheesy MIDI track, or voice-over that I can’t kill (usually at volume 11). Or the sites which make you watch some stupid 15-second or 20-second ad before you get to watch the video you went there for. I just make mental notes to never buy anything from those people.
Finally, let me propose a new circle of Hell for idiots who think that dark grey text on a violet background is a good idea.
Oh, yes. Oh, Yes. That triggers the itch to unleash thermonuclear terror on the sinner, it does.
Must. Resist. Entering. Launch Codes.
There is no rational excuse for this, but somehow it has become pervasive anyway. Just like pop-up ads. They annoy everyone, pretty much everyone found a blocker until the browsers starting building them in. Did anyone ever buy stuff because an ad popped up and interrupted what they were doing with a totally unrelated commercial?
Obviously SOME people must have, or the pop-ups would have gone away on their own. I don’t know who would be dumb enough to be one of them, but I’ll bet they grew up to be a webmaster . . .
“Finally, let me propose a new circle of Hell for idiots who think that dark grey text on a violet background is a good idea.”
Noted. I’ll write up a spec and submit it to the client first thing in the morning; it should be worth another $50 million no-bid contract.
Agreed in full. It’s gotten so I have to be so careful how I move the cursor that it can be difficult to click on the link I actually WANT to click on.
And that whole social network choice popup (don’t know what it’s called)–I think it’s changed, but originally there was no “close” button. You just had to wait. And if it was over something you were trying to read, tough titties.
I have a complaint about PJM, though. Every time I comment, I have to click out of subscribing to the Daily Digest. Every time. And each time I forget, I have to unsubscribe. Is that really necessary?
Steve, this has been brought up before. Opt-In is the way to go. Opt-Out sucks, especially since it keeps defaulting you to “subscribe” every time you hit the page.
I know it’s not up to you, as it is a PJM-managed site. But please bring it up with your “people”.
kthnxbai.
Not in your name…
I looked everywhere on that page for a sign that it’s a satirical post. It’s not, is it? Frak…
You can always “fight back” – I use Firefox with the Adblock and Noscript plugins. Noscript requires some training – it only allows JavaScript to run on sites / domains that you whitelist.
But for that small hassle, I don’t have to experience 99% of the stuff people are griping about here. Yes, web sites should be more polite – but there are things you can do about it.
Speaking of rude things in sites *cough* – having to manually opt out of the Daily Digest e-mail every single time I post on a Pajamas Media site. Pot? Meet kettle…
Evil Red Scandi, how did I not know about those Firefox add-ons?? WOW. I haven’t played with Noscript yet, but Adblock Plus has solved more than three-quarters of the issues I’ve had, and it was a breeze to set up. Hurrah!
I have mixed feelings about recommending NoScript to users who aren’t reasonably advanced… it often requires some tweaking to make many sites work properly (especially with streaming media), and some people just don’t want to hassle with that. But it is The Hammer Of The Gods for stopping unwanted site behavior.
FTA: Finally, get over the whole hover-command thing for ads/Diggs/Tweets/menus/etc. If I don’t click it, it shouldn’t pop up — just like every single other thing on my computer has behaved for almost 20 years
Well now, you own page does just this with the “SHARE” button at the end of your article.
And one other request, don’t require that visitors enable Java and install a special player just to watch the content.
(Yes, I’ll just shut up now.)
Bah. My HTML-fu is apparently b0rken tonight. That was supposed to link to http://www.pjtv.com/page/Firefox_Support_Status/13/
Now this is a page that loads without excessive garbage on it
http://maddox.xmission.com/
Oh, and I love the commentary too. I’m not poaching your readers Steve, but it’s the only site I could think of that goes for the “less is more” look
Preach it, brother Steve.
Add also the oxy-moronic “welcome screen.” And here’s another one I hate that PJM is guilty of: dividing articles (even short ones) into two or three ‘click for next page’ sections. I know it’s all about the ad-eyeball product, but web designers seem obsessed with putting as many clicks as possible between you and the content.
Another point to make is that all this crap can make sites very hostile to the handicapped who may be using non-standard or awkward UI tools.
It’s a shame the iPad/iPhone doesn’t give you the full web experience of annoying Flash popup ads.
Incidentally:
That’s bad just from a practical standpoint. You generally want the people to want to sign up for your newsletter, keeps you from sending out useless emails to people who don’t want it.
More importantly, there are many who, upon receiving one of these unwanted emails and discovering the “tricky” way they have been signed up, will mark email from PM as “Spam” in their spam filter, which is worse than if they merely unsubscribed. Some email newsletters make the unsubscribe link particularly prominent for that very reason. But if PM wants to damage the deliverability of emails to yahoo, gmail, and hotmail accounts…