Pretty 'happy holidays' banner.

[RangerWickett]

My congrats to whoever designed the nifty snowflake banner 'ad.'

 

[Michael Morris]

Thanks. It's the first thing I've done in Flash for awhile - and I managed to get the filesize down to 17 K - making it smaller (memory wise) than most of the other banner ads

 

[Fast Learner]

It is very nice. Unfortunately if you tell IE not to run the ActiveX control (Flash player), the page won't load at all. Traditionally a bit of Javascript is employed that loads an alternate, commonly a gif version of the same ad (explanation here). Would it be possible to add it?

It's not a huge deal, but it means I have to reload the page one, two, even three times before a version with a non-Flash banner appears, allowing the page to load. (This is on a laptop that doesn't like Flash, btw, which is why I have to say "no" to the ActiveX request.)

 

[Michael Morris]

The ENWorld banner as flash is a bit of an experiment - but the problems flash always experiences with certain browsers in something I'm definitely keeping in mind. I'll be looking for some solutions and as soon as one is found and approved by Russ it will be implemented. At the moment though no flash banners other than the holiday one are planned.

 

[cybertalus]

For some reason I don't see any banner ads on EN World, although I used to. It's not an Opera thing either, because I checked in IE and they don't show up there either.

I actually kind of miss them.

 

[Michael Morris]

They are currently invoked by javascript - if you have that turned off...

 

[cybertalus]

I have javascript switched on in Opera, but Opera's rather picky about what javascript does and doesn't work in it. Come to think of it, the ads seemed to disappear about the time I upgraded Opera from 7.2x to 7.54. I also futzed with my cookie and security settings in Opera and set a few entries in my hosts file to the loopback address about that time, so it might be any of those things.

Not sure about IE, since I seldom use it for anything except Windows Updates. Though I think I tweaked the security pretty high in IE, since Juno uses IE to render HTML e-mail, and if I did, that probably killed javascript over there.

 

[cybertalus]

Hey, Michael, I discovered something interesting with the no banner ads things. When the CSS wasn't loading last night I tried out some other styles to see if they were working normally. They weren't, but I did notice that banner ads showed up for me in some styles but didn't in others. Today I checked in both Opera and IE, and discovered I get no banner ads in:

Stealth
Player's Handbook
Electric Blue
d20 Modern
Sky

I see banner ads normally in all the other styles.

Figured I'd post and let you know on the off chance this is a global thing and not a user-specific thing.

 

[Michael Morris]

I have to rebuild those stylesets during the server move, but yes I was aware they were broken.