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Toolbar whac-a-mole


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#1 pRy

pRy
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  • Joined: March 99

Posted 08 September 2017 - 19:35

This has bugged me for a while. I'm lazy and rather than bookmark the forums I load up autosport.com and click "Forum". I've done so forever and it's just a silly habit now. Plus it let's me see the F1 headlines on the way to the forum.
 
However the task of clicking this button has become more and more perilous over time. When I load the main site the link bar the Forum button is part of shifts position on the screen not once, not twice but three times before the page finally decides it's done loading adverts. It's literally shifting between four locations. And the annoying part is when the button moves.. what's inevitably in it's place instead? A clickable advert. 
 
Now there are two possibilities here. One.. it's an unintentional consequence of slow loading adverts and the HTML rendering in a certain way.
Or the slightly questionable scenario.. it's designed to do that so idiots like me end up clicking adverts whilst trying to click the tool bar.
 
I suspect the second scenario is a product of my paranoid imagination but I thought I'd point it out in case it's something you're not aware of.
 
 


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#2 Grayson

Grayson
  • Autosport digital product manager

  • 3,497 posts
  • Joined: July 08

Posted 11 September 2017 - 09:31

 

This has bugged me for a while. I'm lazy and rather than bookmark the forums I load up autosport.com and click "Forum". I've done so forever and it's just a silly habit now. Plus it let's me see the F1 headlines on the way to the forum.
 
However the task of clicking this button has become more and more perilous over time. When I load the main site the link bar the Forum button is part of shifts position on the screen not once, not twice but three times before the page finally decides it's done loading adverts. It's literally shifting between four locations. And the annoying part is when the button moves.. what's inevitably in it's place instead? A clickable advert. 
 
Now there are two possibilities here. One.. it's an unintentional consequence of slow loading adverts and the HTML rendering in a certain way.
Or the slightly questionable scenario.. it's designed to do that so idiots like me end up clicking adverts whilst trying to click the tool bar.
 
I suspect the second scenario is a product of my paranoid imagination but I thought I'd point it out in case it's something you're not aware of.

 

 

As you've guessed - it's the former. The site is always going to load more quickly than the ads, and we obviously want to show you the content on the site as quickly as possible rather than waiting until the ads have loaded. Because the site doesn't know how big the adverts are going to be, it can't render the page at the correct size.

 

It's on our radar, and something that our main designer/UXer really wants to minimise. We managed to get a change in place last year which meant far fewer jumps - we rendered the site with the most common ad sizes before the ads loaded. I think that a combination of changing our ad server and changing some of our ad sizes may have messed this up, so we'll give it another look...