MacMegaSite is one of those unfortunate places which has succumbed to one of the worst “innovations” to hit the web in some time: those annoying double underline links.
Links are the foundation of the web.
Messing with links is a bad idea, pure and simple.
If you choose to mess with links, it had been be extremely important. For example if you highlight a word which is an important term because you have put the definition in a tooltip (which is a bad idea from an accessibility/usability perspective, but that’s beside the point for now) then I might be able to forgive you making that word look like a link, so that when a user mouses over it, the definition pops up (a footnote would be better).
Within a day of these abominations spreading across the web (and they seemed to hit all at once) I immediately started blocking them by disabling JavaScript on the offending sites using Opera’s per-site preferences (right click on a page, click “Edit site preferences” then click on the “Scripting” tab and then uncheck the box next to “Enable JavaScript.”
I didn’t think much more about it.
Until I saw this in the RSS feed for MacMegaSite today:
Do you find those IntelliTXT popup ads annoying? You can get rid of them now by submitting news. I’ve instituted a new points system, where you earn 10 points for every article submitted, 5 points for forum posts, and 1 point for comments. Once you earn 50 points or more, you’ll no longer see IntelliTXT popups as long as you’re logged in. All users have been credited with points for content already submitted.
Dear Content Providers: if you are doing something which your users find annoying, consider this:
Stop doing that.
Look, no one really likes ads (and most of the people who claim to are usually lying or have some vested interest in ads being read by people), but they can be done well. It takes time and effort.
IntelliTXT is not a good example. They are annoying. They try to guess at important words, and often fail, and are distracting. I’ve yet to find anyone who really thinks they are helpful.
But the idea that if I make 10 posts in the forum means that I no longer need to see the ads is particularly galling. What that tells me is that they really aren’t necessary, they are just annoying.
As John Gruber said of Snap Previews: “And if you have these things on your site, turn them off. They’re stupid and distracting.”
At least Snap gives us a way to disable them globally. IntelliTXT does not. However it is fairly easy to disable them for one particular site. Simply add this to /etc/hosts:
127.0.0.1 macmegasite.us.intellitxt.com
You’ll need to restart lookupd which you can do using this command (NOTE: if you don’t understand what this is doing, just restart your Mac instead. I take no responsibility for any typos or unforeseen consequences of running this command in Terminal):
sudo kill -HUP ps -auxwww|fgrep '/lookupd'|fgrep -v grep|awk '{print $2}'
and you may have to restart your browser.
The real moral of the story is this: if you find out something about your site annoys your readers, do you really need to keep doing that?