Our feelings here at Voyager regarding unsolicited pop up ads are simple: We don't like them. This feeling has lent itself to the creation of policy regarding unsolicited pop-up ads: We will not support them (continue reading below). There has been a proliferation of sites on the internet that use pop up ads on their pages, and ask you to pay to remove this annoyance. In our opinions, this practice is akin to extorting money to stop harassing you. If we were getting marketing calls to us during dinner time, or all hours of the night, we would never agree to pay anyone to cease this intrusive and pestering activity. Seizing your browser and spamming you with ads to get you to pay is not much different.

What can you do to change this situation? Well part of the problem is that people started paying less attention to the banner ads at the top or elsewhere on pages. Advertisers started paying less and less for those ads. As revenue from non-intrusive ads went down, sites and advertisers started to use more forceful and intruding pop up ads; increasingly bigger, more numerous, louder. Sites that couldn't pull in enough revenue, or otherwise support itself, shut down. What you can do to help the sites you enjoy visiting or find useful is to click on the ads on the site that you find interesting, or better, to donate money to them directly. This would help them survive without resorting to using pop up ads. Another thing you can do is to write to the sites and the advertiser letting them know that you do not appreciate aggressive marketing, nor being spammed to get you to pay. Internet sites and services do need money to continue serving you. By donating to them, you will be helping to ensure they stick around and also encouraging non-intrusive advertisement.

Here at Voyager, we have debated whether we should declare that we will never use unsolicited pop up ads, or that we should keep it as an option for a last ditch survival effort if the need ever arises. The jury is still out on that issue, but an idea was born of that debate. People who don't mind them, or want to help out more, will be able to opt in and turn on/off pop up ads for themselves in future versions. You will be able to toggle an occasional solicited pop up ad in your user-id account. Since pop up ads do pay considerably more than standard ads, this would be another small way to help VoyForums continue running.


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