@Alex Papadimoulis said:
I've noticed that quite a few visitors use plugins (or whatever) to block the javascript-driven ads that run on this site, and I'm curious as to why they do this. Does anyone do this now and, if so, why?
Well, at first I was just using adblock and made a point not to block ads from small websites that I appreciate like osnews and thedailywtf.com.
As the ads grew more and more disruptive and annoying on other websites, with lots of cheesy flash animated bullshit, large dhtml overlay popups with forced minimal delays before they can be closed, and other kind of bullshit, I ended up just installing filterset.G, a firefox extension that provide a premade filtering list
which auto-updates (http://www.pierceive.com/).
Now about every ad anywhere is blocked and I must admit I didn't go in the trouble of figuring if I could explicitely exclude some websites from the adfilter.
If people don't care about what you're selling, trying your best to interfere with what they're trying to do to convey your marketing message has little chances to be well received.
Yet advertisers can't restrain themselves and keep pushing it, becoming a nuisance. They don't realize that in the end we are the one who decide what content ends up on our pc and that by being excessively disruptive they just make people block all ads altogether.
So bottomline, thank all the stupid abusive advertisers all over the net to have motivated the creation and usage of very potent ad blocking systems.