How to kill pop-up & the X10 "pop-under" ads!

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This question was answered on June 18, 2001. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Pop-up windows used to be most prominent on smaller sites that were hosted for free or dealt in adult entertainment, but now they are everywhere. Web advertisers take advantage of scripting tools that will open new browser windows when you enter or, in the case of the adult sites, try to close the window.

This noticeable increase in intrusive web ads is due in part to the shakeout in the Dot Com world. Advertising rates on the web have plummeted as the once mighty have evaporated into the background.

Sites that exist primarily on advertising revenue must now sell more ads in order to survive. Not only must they sell more ads, they are being pressured by advertisers to use “pop-up & pop-under” ads in order to get “more eyeballs”. When it comes to web based advertising, it’s a buyers market at this point, so the intrusions will likely get worse.

Keep in mind, if you like the content on a “free” website, supporting their advertisers is the best way to keep them around.

But, it doesn’t mean that you have to put up with the insistent attempts by some sites or service providers to take over your desktop. Your e-mail address shows that you are an AOL customer, so the first thing would be to turn off the internal pop-up ads. AOL gives you an option for turning off the pop-up ads generated by their system. To disable them, click on the My AOL button (version 5) or the Settings Menu (version 6) on the toolbar at the top, then on Preferences or type keyword: preferences. Click on the Marketing button and follow the directions for removing pop-up ads. This setting will have no effect on public websites that have pop-up ads, just the internal AOL pop-up ads.

One of the great things about the Internet is that programmers suffer the same abuses as us common mortals so they create programs to overcome them, many times for FREE! One such cyber-hero is Mark Thompson, a.k.a. AnalogX, the self-proclaimed “World's largest freeware developer”. He has created a program called POW! that allows users to permanently block pop-up windows from virtually any website as they run across them.

POW! is a tiny program that loads in the Systray (bottom right corner, next to the clock in Windows based systems) and is very simple to use. Simply click on the icon when a pop-up window appears and add it to the list of windows to block. You can download a copy from <a href="http://datadr.com/pow.htm" target="_blank">datadr.com/pow.htm</a>.

Users of the MacOS or Linux can give WebWasher a try at <a href="http://www.webwasher.com" target="_blank">www.webwasher.com</a>. (The AnalogX program seems to be more stable for Windows users.)

Another new development is something called a “pop-under” ad that quietly launches under the current browser window, so you don’t notice it until you close the window on top.

The X10 camera company has used this technique in their ads all over the web. Enough of us have been bombarded with the X10 pop-under ads that the company has posted a link on their website to block the ads for 30-days.

A check of the posted link shows that they are limiting the number of days as a variable in the link. If you change the “DAY=30” to “DAY=3000” you can extend the “no-bug” time from 30 days to 3000 days! If you don’t understand how to use the information above, just click on the link below:

<a href="http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=3000&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm" target="_blank">>http://www.x10.com/home/optout.cgi?DAY=3000&PAGE=http://www.x10.com/x10ads1.htm</a>.

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