I don’t even have an adblocker but I get that message anytime I go in through an incognito Firefox tab. I decided if my ad revenue wasn’t good enough for them, I wasn’t going to go there for a month even though I know the fix is to do the above in chrome instead. Unfortunately I forgot when the month started. We’ll see.
If Ars Technica pulled the same thing, I’m not sure I could go a whole month but I don’t really miss today’s Wired.
YES. I have a vast menagerie of pet peeves, but this is a big one. “I just got here, I don’t know if I even like you yet . . . but now I automatically like you less.” 
My reflexes and peripheral vision have gotten so good that I close these and keep on reading without even knowing the content of the window. This cost of this kind of advertising is completely wasted on me.
How about never?
Never’s good for me
If it helps (it probably doesn’t), wonky modal display behaviors on mobile devices are more of a browser rendering quirk than an intentional effort on the part of the developer to further irritate you. Certain ways of creating modals - including a lot of stuff that “just worked” before the rise of the mobile web, like absolute positioning in pixel units - define modals in a way that causes the browser to get really squirrely when trying to calculate where the hell to put it. I’ve seen even well-intentioned modals, like login dialogs, fall victim to this. So, really, it’s more of an unintentional effort on the part of the developer to further irritate you by not testing their stuff on small displays… like I said, that probably doesn’t help.
Credit card forms are also one of those things that suck so much because they end up being a bunch of trade-offs between development constraints, UX and accessibility concerns, and HTML’s native capabilities. As a result, they end up sucking way more than they should, because there’s only a few difficult ways to do it right, and a million easy ways to do it wrong. To explain:
HTML5 has a “number” input type, which empowers the browser to help out with input validation (though not all browsers do this) and, on most mobile devices, automatically brings up a numeric keyboard, which is a nice UX bonus. Unfortunately, the “number” input type is really really simplistic, and doesn’t support defining patterns for things like phone numbers or credit cards where certain extra characters like dashes or parens are either allowed or automatically included at certain points. You can hack together a series of four separate number fields, but connecting them so that typing behaves exactly as though you were dealing with one field requires a fair amount of JavaScript to do it correctly (which can cause accessibility issues for assistive technologies like screen readers), and mobile browsers have a bad tendency to auto-dismiss the keyboard when you try to move between fields programatically, which is actively bad UX. Any other input type loses you the default numeric keyboard on mobile devices, requires additional work to properly validate the input, and introduces more opportunities for input inconsistencies (I know you would never put two spaces between one pair of quartets, but someone else absolutely will). You can define permissible input patterns on text fields (using regular expressions, sigh), but then the onus is on the user to understand the pattern, because the input field itself will only validate the input, not automatically constrain the input as it’s typed. You can use a JavaScript tool to depict those constraints visually (ever seen a date field that says “__ / __ / ____” when you click on it?), but in my experience those are pretty universally garbage, and again run into accessibility concerns. None of this is to say that it can’t be done, but it’s much more difficult to do right, and sometimes the time needed just isn’t available.
If you think that’s annoying, wait until you actually sign up for the email newsletter (because hey, I actually kind of like this site and might want to read more), receive the email newsletter and think hmmm, this article looks interesting, I think I’ll click through and read it, so you do, but before you can read anything there’s a modal pop-up prompting you to sign up for their email newsletter, which is in fact the very same email newsletter you’re already subscribed to and which you. just. came. from. so in a fit of pique you close the browser without reading the article, go back to your email and unsubscribe from their newsletter (that’ll show 'em), add their domain to your email blacklist and hosts file so that you won’t ever even accidentally have anything to do with the evil bastards who run that site, but you’re still angry an unsatisfied so you hurl your phone through the glass of your front window, where it will land in the street to be run over by cars (and even big trucks, if you’re lucky!), then you grab your desktop display, raise it high over your head, and then SMASH it on the floor, following that immediately with a well-placed ninja-kick to your tower (ki-YAH!), and the next thing you know you’re in your backyard with a can of lighter fluid in one hand, reflexively flicking your Bic with the other, as you watch the flames consume your laptop and try not to choke on the toxic fumes, and that’s when you decide to rage-quit the internet because F*CK ALL THIS MODAL POP-UP BULLSHIT!!!1!
When I am talking to people in meatspace, when should I put Post-Its on their face? Is this a good way to meet people?
Extra credit for the small, passive-aggressive(No, I hate great deals) escape link; but shouldn’t there be something superficially resembling the corner ‘X’ enshrined in basically all window managers; but either nonfunctional or deceptive? It just isn’t the same without one of those.
Why use a tiny fragment of trivial, client side, javascript to automatically clean up your entry for you when I could have the javascript toss a whiny pop-up in your face? It’s not like automation is supposed to make your life easier or anything.
—The A.V. Club
“When should web designers use moda” NEVER.
My super favorite is when I’m searching for tech support for an urgent problem, and am asked to take a survey about the site I haven’t yet seen. So much love for those programmers.
(Almost as much love as for the programmers responsible for making sure I get a text at 3:51am telling me that my ATT cellular bill has been paid.)
I admit I am partly guilty. But it’s mostly a legacy UI, and I am trying to replace the modals we currently use in our very complex software with full screen overlays as part of killing ExtJS. It may be good, but I hate it for doing everything in JavaScript and bloating up the DOM. Modals are just a part of that bloated framework and still the only good way to make complex settings.
I saw a new, terrible spin on the modal overlay the other day. I was scrolling an article and as I was scrolling a full page ad literally faded in and blocked the entire page as I was scrolling and wouldn’t go away until I completely scrolled it off the page. It was fucking awful.
Another one is the terrible one that pops up when downloading the Power BI desktop app. It makes it seem like you need to sign up for a mailing list for the download to proceed but it’s already downloading.
These modal overlays are a menace.
Those are especially awful on mobile devices where “center” isn’t where you would expect. (Oh and fuck pages that block zoom gestures while on mobile.)
Well, I use NoScript to protect myself from drive-by downloads, which in the current environment is (unfortunately) much like running an ad-blocker. I try to white-list sites that I frequent, but even then, the truth is that sites can no longer survive on “friendly” image ads that NoScript would let through.
However, it’s easy enough to surf with NoScript that I end up enjoying most sites content while providing nothing in the way of compensation for the writers and publishers time, money and investment.
Thus, when I get a “haha, locked you out unless you disable ad blocker” dialog, I consider that they’ve made it clear that my taking all their content for free is no longer welcome. I make a conscious decision as to whether support the site (usually through subscription, if available) or not to surf their site at all (admittedly, the vast majority of the time).
Messing with the HTML when they’ve made their feelings clear feels a little too much like jimmying the lock on the store when they moved the fruit stand indoors because too many people like me where helping themselves to “free” apples.
Well, I object to the analogy between stealing physical objects and viewing content - the harm of theft (and it’s definition in the criminal code) is depriving another person of property; we forget that in favour of a notion of theft that is focused on the rights to wealth rather than harm done. Plus, likening people to thieves (like those old anti-satelite TV “theft” ads) is a spectacularly bad way to get them to cooperate. I feel like the whole conversation needs to be reframed.
I do agree with the basic idea, though. By the time I’ve seen a thing that says, “disable adblock before using our site” and I have chosen not to do it, I’m, clearly going against their wishes and I agree that’s not really the right thing to do. I’m escalating rather than de-escalating an adversarial situation. I probably had a bad choice of words with “very inclined to do so” when I should have said, “very tempted to do so.” It’s something I have done, but I don’t make a habit of it.
But the flip side of that is that I stand with people who actually do do that, if any such people really exist. Most of the time if I went around circumventing people’s modal dialogues instead of just not using their site, I think I would just be a jerk. If someone else is doing it, I can imagine many non-jerk motives on their behalf.
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