Is it just me or does anyone else here notice that every so often, when an LQ page tries to load, it gets hung up waiting for the banner from burstnet.com to load. I hate to gripe about the people who are paying $$ to support this site, but could they please ditch their 56k modem and get a faster connection? I mean I wouldn't mind waiting for the banner itself to load up, but I can see the page load then it disappears when it tries to contact burstnet, leaving me sitting in front of a blank screen for an eternity. All of the other sponsors banners load just fine, just the burstnet ones take forever!

I don't have any problems with burstnet and the banner ads probably 98% of the time seem to load fairly fast on my end...

What's a banner? I browse with Links

I have the same problem. I hate it. Sometimes the page times out waiting for the banners to finish, and I have to hit refresh.

I hate how banner ads and popups are getting more and more popular, because people have broadband. I don't pay broadband so I can see more ads.

Kinda sux.......but the info is worth it.

Hopefully I can invent a TIVO type device to browse all the pages you like to see and remove all ads and then you can just browse stuff how you like it. It would just browse forums and sites for you about 3 minutes ahead of time

Oh well....

Kind of strange that it happens to some people and not others. Maybe it's something with the routing to their servers. I've tried the refresh thing, but 90% of the time I still get a burstnet banner that doesn't load.

> Hopefully I can invent a TIVO type device to browse all the pages you like to see and remove all ads and then you can just browse stuff how you like it. It would just browse forums and sites for you about 3 minutes ahead of time

Sign me up! I'll be customer #1.

The banner ads are necessary evil as they help with some of the costs of running LinuxQuestions.

For what it's worth I've also had random issues with loading burstnet banner ads as well. Some days it takes forever. That's life.

I completely understand the need to have banners. I just wasn't sure if it was just me or not. It seemed strange to have a page hang like that forever waiting for a banner to load. I haven't had a problem like that till just recently.

And many of us dial-up users have no choice in the matter. I live in the second largest city in my state and have no other options to connect to the internet other than a <56k connection.

Maybe it's coz your browser has to go through it's flash or java plugin routines, and that holds up the rendering of the html?

You know, if your smarter than the computer, there are ways around this so-called problem of loading burstnet ads...... but my mouth is kept shut though. Didn't hear it from me.

You could always become a contributing member, to have the ability to turn the ads off... Hmmm...

I try not to run many so called rich media ads as I think they are annoying. If you do see a problem with burst in the future please let me know ASAP and provide a traceroute to the ad server if possible. I will then open a ticket with burst. The fact that some people have a problem and some dont is likely related to the fact that IE users will get IFRAME ads so the page will never hang even if the ad server is completely down.

--jeremy

I'll let you know next time it happens again and I'll include the traceroute results as well. Thanks for responding and taking an interest. I think that's part of what makes LQ such a great site!

This doesn't solve anything but...

I use galeon

settings-preferences-advanced-filtering-imageloading

i turn off image loading or load from current server only.

no more ads. Of course, no more pictures either. But its easy to change if you want to. And for a site like this, you know you don't need images.

A better option might be Mozilla 1.3 : Preferences -> Privacy & Security -> Images, and select the 'Accept images that come from the originating server only' radio button.

Keep in mind that ads help support LQ. That would make the *best* option becoming a contributing member and then UserCP->Profile->ShowAds->no

--jeremy