very annoying ARCO advertisement on Forum page

I was wondering if any of the American BNers have had recent experience with a tall, rectangular, mostly blue ARCO oil company advertisement which appears near the upper left of the BN Forum page (http://www.basenotes.net/forum.php), projecting down from the top of the page and extending well into the body of it. It appears to be placed in the horizontal ad position at the top of the page, even though it is a vertical ("skyscraper") ad. It is usually accompanied by a similar ARCO advertisement appearing in the lower right of the same page, in a more conventional position.

This advertisement steals the focus of the page, and prevents the viewer from entering text into login and password fields in the upper right. (So even paid members cannot avoid being inconvenienced by it.) Attempts to avoid the ad are met with a series of non-popup windows which attempt to begin to cover the screen. I discovered that the ad disables links and text-entry fields on the page which are both closer to the top of the page than the bottom of the ad AND which are within the horizontal range of a typical top banner ad (which includes the login text-entry window). I've attached a screenshot.

I did not check the source code of the loaded page to see if this was a legitimate, planned part of the page. But I suspect it was since the second accompanying ad fit well into the lower right ad position on the page. The only way I found to effectively avoid the ad was to close the browser (Firefox, in my case), and reload the page until another, less invasive ad cycled into position.

In any case, I haven't run across so invasive an advertisement on BN yet. Hopefully, this will not become a trend ...

Grant, you're doing pretty well if this sort of thing happens only occasionally. I used to write ad-targeting software for one of the largest ISPs in the United States, and we used to have meetings at least once a week about such issues. All of this was because the third-party companies doing the targeting and serving can change the creative feeds at any moment, often without warning. In this case, a "skyscraper" ad was obviously (and mistakenly) being fed into a horizontal banner position, and that can cause all kinds of trouble.


Actually, it wasn't that nefarious. It was apparently a simple geometry error on the part of the third-party company choosing the creative. It just didn't fit, and squeezing it onto the page stole the focus away from other areas of the page. One of those areas just happened to be the login area. That's why it looked as if it were hijacking the page.

Unfortunately, in today's economy there is no longer any viable way to avoid this mechanism, especially for a relatively small website. I'm sure if you were to ask Grant if he'd like to spend his spare time verifying constantly changing incoming creatives, he might cringe a bit. There isn't enough Bois du Portugal on the planet to take the sting out of that kind of job.

I just had to deal with this ad three times in a row while trying to log into the forum. Two page refreshes in a row returned to the same ad, failing to cycle the banner away to another creative. This is mostly annoying because it is not possible to bypass the ad in order to log in, since text entry into the login box is disabled while the ad is present.

I thought this ad was disabled. What happened???