The extremely obtrusive pop-ads arrived after iVillage bought gardenweb. My impression is that the ads drove aways a huge percentage of visitors, leaving some forums almost moribund compared to pre-ads levels of traffic.

I'd prefer an annual subscription to buy access to gardenweb rather than fighting ads for crap I'll never buy.

From a suggestion here, I added NoScript to Firefox and made gardenweb tolerable again, but the forums are still much less useful than pre-iVillage.

Google toolbar and ie popup blocker must be killing them for me as I dont have that problem... every once in a while I get an add for something, I couldnt even tell you what it is though LOL thats effective advertising huh!

no popups here. I use both Google Bar and AdShield.

I HIGHLY recommend AdShield. As new ways to irritate you come along, you can add more block information. And if you use it wisely, you can block everything. It's all in what you send to the block list.

Then, for sites where you do want popups, i.e. you bank or YouTube.com (cough) ):)p you can add them to the Exclude list and also tell Google to let it through.

blondboy47,

I'll definitely look into Adshield. I have the Google toolbar but the pop-ups still get thru. I can identify with what unautre said too......will second his motion for an annual subscription. I understand iVillage has to pay for all of this somehow, but find it hard to believe that pop-ups would generate enough revenue to make them worthwhile.