"Website Not Available"

[Capot]

For the last few weeks, I have seen the box below increasingly often, either when opening pprune.org, or more often when opening a forum or a thread, or when going to a new page in a thread.

In the last 10 days it has appeared on at last 50% of attempts.

All other websites are working normally, ie banks, met, Dropbox, Quickbooks accounts on line, our own company site, Paypal etc etc. This box only appears on Pprune.

http://i1085.photobucket.com/albums/j431/picshooter2/ScreenShot08-11-14at06.jpg

Is it me? Or is there a problem with Pprune?

[OFSO]

Haven't seen it on PPRuNe but increasingly elsewhere.....the 'nets beginning to break down....

[BEagle]

Certainly the level of advertising contamination is slowing down PPRuNe website loading considerably.

Will someone please tell those greedy Yanks who now run this site to cut it down?

Or have they never heard about geese and golden eggs?

[Capetonian]

Certainly the level of advertising contamination is slowing down PPRuNe website loading considerably.What's advertising?

Firefox + Adblocker = NO ADVERTS .... EVER

[ericlday]

When will they ever learn !!!!

[gemma10]

Ninety nine per cent. Plus ghostery = 100%

[KBPsen]

Capot,

Does it make any difference whether you are logged in or not?

[Booglebox]

I have no problem with advertising but I block it for technical reasons. Text and images are ok but flash and GIFs waste battery life and bandwidth. Can highly recommend Adblock Plus (available for all major browsers).
To avoid losing out on revenue, the correct thing to do as a site owner is to detect ad-blockers and then with a small banner either solicit donations in lieu of ad clicks, or have non-intrusive non-moving ads and ask the user to unblock. :cool:

[Capot]

Does it make any difference whether you are logged in or not?

No; I did think of that and experimented. There was no noticeable difference.

By the way, does anyone know how to kill advertising in Chrome?

(I gave up on Firefox a long time ago.)

I suspect that the issue I'm having is not the result of advertising; in th past i recall a lot of delay but here was a message saying "waiting for..." with an advertising URL. I'm not seeing that.

I closed down the browser after my previous post and then tried to log back in to Pprune; it took 6 attempts just to get to the Home page URL.

I've downloaded Adblock and discovered that it is a Chrome add-on....

So it's installed, I even paid USD20.

Let's see if it makes a difference.

[The Flying Pram]

I even paid USD20

You PAID for it??? It's free software! I'm wondering what else has been installed...

[Mechta]

A well known internet auction site appears to have gone t*ts up in several countries this morning...

Although a quick internet search suggests people on BT can still get it; strange?

[Cameronian]

Try Adblock Edge, Booglebox.....

[Booglebox]

Thanks Cameronian, but I already disabled the "allow some ads" whitelist so it would make no difference :cool: Will use for future installs though.

[BEagle]

I have 2 computers connected to the same WiFi router. One uses Win7SP1 with all updates, plus TrendMicro Internet Security. The other uses Win8.1u1 with all updates, plus McAfee anti-virus software. Both use IE11 as the primary browser.

With the Win7 machine, PPRuNe is slower to load than any other site I know, but does so reasonably quickly. Whereas with Win8.1, PPRuNe often fails to respond and I get 'pprune.org failed to respond due to long running script' prompts. Eventually, after all the wretched adverts load, it becomes accessible.....

'googleads' and 'adclick' seem to be the culprits - the greed of excessive advertising is ruining PPRuNe and is ultimately self-defeating as more and more people resort to advert blockers.

Saab Dastard - can you do anything to improve matters? Because soon there won't be many golden eggs left for the current site owners once they've killed their goose through excessive advertising....:(

[Saab Dastard]

Nothing I can do. You overestimate my influence.

SD

[Capot]

So, to recap, I installed Adblock on 12th August, along with my 'donation' of US$20.

Unnecessary that donation may have been, but since I made that post on 12th August I have not seen "website not available" once, nor any adverts on Pprune or any other website.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I think it was excellent advice; many thanks to Booglebox.

And I think the developer deserves to be rewarded.