You recently added a new type of advertising on your site which looks like a
slightly different form of hyperlink. Now, normally this wouldn’t be a problem,
I am always in favor of keeping content free though recouping hosting costs
with advertising , but this new form not only severely impacts Opera’s keyboard
navigation, but somehow manages to reformat the whole page’s text if Opera’s
zoom function is in use and one of the links is highlighted (which is
unavoidable with keyboard navigation), making it unreadable.
Can I turn it off. Please?
As you point out, Ask Leo! is a completely free service, and primarily
advertiser supported.
The neat thing about the advertising programs that Ask Leo! uses, is that
they are “contextual” – meaning they relate to the content being presented.
Even though I have no control over which ads are displayed, quite often those
ads are part of the very solution that readers are looking for.
But I definitely don’t want ads to get in the way of your ability to even
view Ask Leo! pages, so at the risk of decreasing the advertising income a
little, I’ll show you how you can turn it off.
Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!
I know you’re running Opera, but by far the easiest way I can think of is
the NoScript extension to FireFox. Most advertising of this form is presented
through the use of Javascript code blocks. By instructing NoScript to disallow
scripts from kontera.com and from intellitxt.com, these in-line ads will no longer be displayed. (Opera
may have this functionality, I’m not sure.)
OK, so there’s one simpler way and that’s to disallow all Javascript
everywhere. The problem here is that so many sites require Javascript for their
functionality turning it off everywhere just isn’t practical, in my
opinion.
If you can’t disable scripting on a site-by-site basis, then the next best
thing is to modify your hosts file to prevent access to the advertiser’s
site.
I’ve talked about modifying the hosts as a way to fake DNS when
you’re testing a new website, but it’s also a common technique for blocking
unwanted advertising.
Using a text editor such as notepad, add these lines:
127.0.0.1 kona.kontera.com
127.0.0.1 ask-leo.us.intellitxt.com
to the text file c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts – or the same file
elsewhere if your Windows installation is in a directory other than C:\windows.
In any case, the file should already exist.
What this does is tell your computer that “kona.kontera.com” and “ask-leo.us.intellitxt.com” are located at
127.0.0.1, which is a shorthand for your own machine. Of course it’s not really
there, so the access to get the advertising Javascript fails, and fails
quickly. The result? No ads.
Depending on how aggressively your browser or your system caches files, you
*may* need to exit and restart your browser, or even reboot to flush
appropriate caches before the ads disappear.
Hope that helps. Even if you can’t see my ads, I’m glad you find Ask Leo!
valuable enough to want to take these steps.
