Twice in the past day I've gotten a popup "free smilies" add when I loaded the BABlog page. It isn't happening every time and I haven't been able to replicate it just now but it's pretty annoying. I suspect it's a safe bet that the free smilies come with equally free sypware.

Edit: I'm using FireFox at work, set to block popups, but some get through.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

I confirm.

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I just saw another one under IE. I may have been running under IE when I got them earlier as well, but FireFox definitely doesn't stop everything. Seems to be coming from tribalfusion.com.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

No, no spyware. I'm trying out a new ad service. I am of mixed opinions on popunders. If enough people hate them I'll filter them out.

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Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

I think Trebuchet meant that IF you elected to get the free smilies, they would possibly come with other free attached software, of the spyware variety, that you might not really want.

This BA Blog reader would decline popunders as rather aggravating.

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Phil, I'm begging you, get RID of tribalfusion. Now that I'm home, on dial-up, your blog page took about four minutes to load. At least three minutes was "connecting to tribalfusion.com", "waiting for tribalfusion.com", "downloading from tribalfusion.com", "waiting for tribalfusion.com" (again), and on and on. I know you've got to pay the bills but there's got to be a better way. And every time there's a tribalfusion ad on the main page, you get a popup when you leave. I have serious doubts about the ethics of these clowns.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

Another current ugliness is a classmates.com floating ad (interactive map of United States), above the BA Blog content. I was trying to copy and paste some text from Eggs, bacon, sausage, and spam -- in fact, the title as a label for that link -- and part of the text was under the ad, and when I tried to highlight the entire text, the ad expanded whenever the cursor came near it, so I couldn't see at all what I was doing. Grr...

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Yeah. The classmates one is gone. I saw that before your post. :-)

Ads are a difficult thing to deal with. Fraser and I are still fiddling with different things. I don't want to make visiting the site painful!

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Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

Don't sweat it. I only sound angry. Well, I was a little, but at classmates, not you. The growling's just for fun.

I understand the distinct upside of having ads, and know it's a struggle to do it with the sort of quality you aim for. Hang in there. I will.

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Thanks Phil. You're doing a great job and we do appreciate it.

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Cum catapultae proscribeantur tum soli proscripti catapultas habeant.

It's back...

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Unless it's a huge wad of money for you all for the ads, then I could do without them. And I'm not happy about blockers, either. A nice clean no hassle site is best.