How to suppress JS-popups?

There are many websites that obviously earn some money by partnering with companies that sell advertisement (like "Vibrant") by "enriching" webpages with hotspots (usually dashed underlined words), which - when one happens to hover over them with the mouse - pop up ads referring to that particular word (or sometimes it's just some completely unrelated garbage).

I absolutely *HATE* these kinds of ads! Normally the presence of such ads is an instant reason for me to flee such a page immediately. Occasionally, however, one really wants to read some text found on such pages and then one often first has to get rid of all that garbage that got popped up. And the downside is, since these are apparently part of the page being loaded these can't even be blocked by popup blockers...). Can one somehow prevent this style of advertisement? Bye blocking specific domains where these scripts load their content from?

The downside is, that these pages are always created dynamically and thus "view source" doesn't reveal the actual contents that's displayed nor does it give any clue re. the domains where these ads come from). "View source" only shows the (usually empty) content that was initially loaded (but which then gets filled in after loading.

Is there any technique to prevent these popups or at least figure out the URLs and hence which sites to block to minimize this annoyance?

Michael

Google ad blocking software.
---
Leonard Grey
Errare humanum est

Michael Moser wrote:
> There are many websites that obviously earn some money by partnering with companies that sell advertisement (like "Vibrant") by "enriching" webpages with hotspots (usually dashed underlined words), which - when one happens to hover over them with the mouse - pop up ads referring to that particular word (or sometimes it's just some completely unrelated garbage).
>
> I absolutely *HATE* these kinds of ads! Normally the presence of such ads is an instant reason for me to flee such a page immediately. Occasionally, however, one really wants to read some text found on such pages and then one often first has to get rid of all that garbage that got popped up. And the downside is, since these are apparently part of the page being loaded these can't even be blocked by popup blockers...). Can one somehow prevent this style of advertisement? Bye blocking specific domains where these scripts load their content from?
>
> The downside is, that these pages are always created dynamically and thus "view source" doesn't reveal the actual contents that's displayed nor does it give any clue re. the domains where these ads come from). "View source" only shows the (usually empty) content that was initially loaded (but which then gets filled in after loading.
>
> Is there any technique to prevent these popups or at least figure out the URLs and hence which sites to block to minimize this annoyance?
>
> Michael
>

Michael Moser wrote:

> Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

NEVER use quoted-printable format when posting to newsgroups. To
explain why, see what happens when your super-long lines get truncated
(which can happen in forums using gateways to Usenet, someone using a
command-line newsreader, or otherwise viewing your post in which
scrolling is not added - which is a pain the a*s to move around the
overly long lines - or when the window does not automatically wrap the
long lines to fit inside the window's width).

In Outlook Express for when posting in newsgroups, select MIME encoding
(not UUencode) but select "None". Also select a reasonably line length
to prevent them getting too long, especially when quoting in replies, to
something under 76 characters (I use 72).

<following overly long lines snipped at 72 characters>
> There are many websites that obviously earn some money by partnering wit
> I absolutely *HATE* these kinds of ads! Normally the presence of such ad
> The downside is, that these pages are always created dynamically and thu
> Is there any technique to prevent these popups or at least figure out th

You can use ad-blocking software. IE7 Pro is an add-on that works with
IE7 but has some problems with IE8.

You could also filter out the advertising content by doing so upstream
of the web browser. I use Avast's anti-virus which has a web shield
that allows me to block on URLs. Some firewalls also have a feature to
block on URLs. In the past, I've used OpenDNS as a substitute for my
ISP's DNS server because OpenDNS can let you block based on categories
of web sites and also enter your own URLs for domains to block (but only
up to 50 for a free account). Another method (which I do not use and do
not recommend) is by using a pre-built 'hosts' file that someone else
compiled of "bad" sites. As long as you don't run a web server on your
own host (from which you web browse), they work by redirecting a host
(not a domain but a host on a domain) to your localhost. Since you
aren't running a web server, there is nothing to serve up that content.
See http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm. Typically these
other-person-than-you compiled hosts files will include the advertisers
that clutter up web pages with these somewhat hidden ad links.

The ad content that you mention are called Intellitext ads because
Intellitext was the first to proliferate this popup crap using
Javascript. If you look at the Javascript code, you can usually tell
from where it obtains its advertising content (based on the word on
which you click). As I hit sites that use these intellitxt adds (the
keywords are often double-underlined and a popup appears when the mouse
hovers over them), they get added to my URL blocking list. However,
there are no comments in that list to let me later know why they got
added so there's no point in giving you the entire list since I don't
know which were added because of them using intellitext ads. Some of
them are (shown with wildcards since I block them if they are anywhere
in the URL string):

*.vibrantmedia.com*
*.intellitxt.com*
*.infolinks.com*
*.builtintext.com*

Intellitxt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellitext