Vox ads even on login?

October 12, 2006 8:02 AM

Vox ads, even for members? I use the plain text theme and I see these ads on the front page of Mefi and AskMe.

I know this has come up before but I don't want to see any ads. That was one of my reasons for slapping my £2.69 on the barrelhead. As far as I can tell opinion seems to be fairly evenly split between members who don't want to see ads at all and those who don't mind. Therefore, please make a preference so that those who wish to see ads can see them (or vice versa, I don't give a monkey's).
posted by bouncebounce to feature requests at 8:02 AM (29 comments total)

Actually I shouldn't have used vice versa but you get my meaning.
posted by bouncebounce at 8:04 AM on October 12, 2006

I don't think it's a paid placement (I could be wrong, though). I think it's Matt trying to get rid of his 1,000 invitations.
posted by mr_crash_davis at 8:07 AM on October 12, 2006

Yeah, it's just a free blog thing that sorta kinda looks like an ad but I dunno. Is it really that bad? I put it at the bottom of the sidebars.
posted by mathowie at 8:12 AM on October 12, 2006

Understood. It looked and smelled like and ad, so pardon my jumpiness.
posted by bouncebounce at 8:15 AM on October 12, 2006

If you are complaining about a single 165x130 ad below the fold on the Metafilter home page, then you either 1) actively want to prevent Matt from being able to keep this site up, 2) need some pointers about how to increase your resolution beyond 640x480.

(To play devil's advocate here: "It's not an ad because you aren't getting reimbursed for it, Matt? What if it was a link to a coupon you could print out for 50 cents off Pepsi Blue? Would that be an ad?")
posted by Plutor at 8:16 AM on October 12, 2006

Christ on a bike. Get adblock and quitchyerbitchin.
posted by chiababe at 8:16 AM on October 12, 2006

it's a big booger when I read MeFi on the PDA.
posted by carsonb at 8:19 AM on October 12, 2006

sorry, meant to go on a bit more: ...on the PDA, even with the 'plain text' preference set.
posted by carsonb at 8:20 AM on October 12, 2006

It is biggish on small screens but otherwise pretty innocuous. Maybe make it a bit smaller?
posted by jessamyn at 8:21 AM on October 12, 2006

Does this constitute an endorsement of Vox, Mr. Haughey (or anyone else)? Is it any good? There was talk of using Vox as the organizing principle of a MeFi writers' group so I am a little interested...
posted by Mister_A at 8:24 AM on October 12, 2006

Yeah, just adblock it if you're really bent. Instant satisfaction. See here, Mister_A.
posted by prostyle at 8:28 AM on October 12, 2006

Does this constitute an endorsement of Vox, Mr. Haughey (or anyone else)?

Did you not even click on the link? Try clicking, and you'll see this:

“Vox is an amazingly flexible new blogging app that lets you share posts, video, music with just friends, family, or the world. I highly recommend it.”
—Matt Haughey, Metafilter publisher
posted by SeizeTheDay at 8:36 AM on October 12, 2006

Yea I clicked on it after I wrote the question. I sent for an invite and haven't received it yet.
posted by Mister_A at 8:48 AM on October 12, 2006

Dude, Vox is run by his buddies at Six Apart, so it's an A-List Cabal thing. It's not going away.

And since anildash is probably going to pop up in this thread with a devestating remark, I have a question:

How are you differentiating the following products/services?

TypePad
LiveJournal
Vox

They seem to have a lot of overlap.
posted by keswick at 9:23 AM on October 12, 2006

Dude, Vox is run by his buddies at Six Apart, so it's an A-List Cabal thing. It's not going away.

Nice. It'll go away when the 1,000 invites are gone, or one month, whichever comes first. I really like the service, apart from my friendship with some employees there (did you notice I stopped using Movable Type on my personal blog?).

How are you differentiating the following products/services?
TypePad
LiveJournal
Vox

I use all three, and I'd say Typepad is great for business-minded hosted blogging. It's turnkey, you never have to install or update anything, and you can point any domain you want at the blog. I see it less as a personal blogging platform and if you check out their featured blogs on typepad on their front page, they're almost always business blogs or people running a blog as a business thing.

LiveJournal and Vox have a lot of overlap, but personally, I like Vox much more (and I stopped using LJ) because it has a easier to use interface and just seems to have none of the geeky cruft that LJ has. I'd say LJ is a pretty mature product that has definite geek roots and sometimes that gets in the way of using it (complex settings for almost everything, a template/theme language that's tough to understand or tweak, weird RSS channels-as-journals etc) where Vox is just simple and sweet point and click without any cruft. Vox is like a second generation version of LJ.
posted by mathowie at 9:44 AM on October 12, 2006

mathowie: actually, i did. i like wordpress a lot, too.

As for the LJ versus Vox, that was pretty much my take on it to. It should be interesting to watch the shakedown on them. A lot of the LJ users seem to be resistant to change, so I wonder if it will come down to forcing a merge, feature-creep in LJ until it is indistinguishable from Vox, or letting LJ disappear by user attrition.
posted by keswick at 9:55 AM on October 12, 2006

Get adblock and quitchyerbitchin.

Nobody ever has to look at ads if they don't want to.
posted by sonofsamiam at 10:05 AM on October 12, 2006

(did you notice I stopped using Movable Type on my personal blog?)

Holy shit!! Welcome to the WordPress club!
posted by timeistight at 10:16 AM on October 12, 2006

That was a little WordPress fanboyish. I just always imagined that you and John Gruber would be the last Movable Type holdouts outside of Six Apart.
posted by timeistight at 11:13 AM on October 12, 2006

I'm always a bit overwhelmed when I try to use the net on someone's computer without firefox, adblock plus, and filterset.g updater. I don't understand why anyone would surf this way, but I don't really get QVC either. You can allow ads on specific sites if you wish to do so for patronage reasons or otherwise.

Definitely a client-side solution for this problem.
posted by Manjusri at 11:58 AM on October 12, 2006

I installed adblock only recently and I'm still in the honeymoon phase where I'm glad to see an ad because I get to make it go away. I'm usually pretty resistant to messing around with settings and plugins and whatever, but the adblock mozilla extension is sweet.
posted by shelleycat at 12:10 PM on October 12, 2006

VISIT QUONSAR.VOX.COM TODAY!
posted by quonsar at 12:16 PM on October 12, 2006

I can get behind hating popups and really obtrusive banner ads, but this? Eh. Is it really that unpleasant to look at?
posted by LittleMissCranky at 12:22 PM on October 12, 2006

Man, the Decemberists are really starting to grow on me.
posted by boo_radley at 12:27 PM on October 12, 2006

Wow. Some people are trying really hard to completely fail to catch my drift.

I wasn't bitching, I fully realise, accept and embrace the fact that it doesn't bother some people, so I asked if we could have a preference to do with ads.

Then, Matt pointed out what it really is, and I don't have a problem with it.

But hey, don't let me get in the way of your willful wankery.
posted by bouncebounce at 12:59 PM on October 12, 2006

Cuteoverload got rid of theirs in like half a day.
posted by thirteenkiller at 1:42 PM on October 12, 2006

mathowie writes "Is it really that bad?"

I ad blocked it because I found the whiteness of it overwhelming, especially on Ask. And I kept on thinking I wasn't logged in. Something not quite so bright would have been better. Really attention getting though.
posted by Mitheral at 2:29 PM on October 12, 2006

As soon as I am able to post on metatalk again, I'll start a thread about the Vox Metafilter Writer's Group idea, and see if we can get it going. It should be relatively simple.

The idea is you add 'mefiwrigro' as an interest and tag all submissions as 'mefiwrigro'. Then Everyone in the group subscribes to that tag feed. When you click on your 'Read' page on Vox, you'll see everyone's latest entries under your subscribed tag.

If you only want your submissions read by other members of the group, do a search for folks with the 'mefiwrigro' interest and friend all of them, and make all your submissions viewable only by friends, friending is one way on vox, so it should be relatively invisible to the other members of the group if you choose to do it that way.

I think if we're going to do 'themes', maybe everyone should also subscribe to the mefiwrigrotheme tag, and tag posts suggesting weekly themes as that, first come first serve(?)

One advantage to doing it on Vox, is if someone makes a really stellar entry for the week, you can tag it as 'this is good' and get some recognition on the front page, possibly.

(Comments, Suggestions? I'll be posting this as a MeTa thread this afternoon or tomorrow)
posted by empath at 5:51 AM on October 13, 2006

Thanks Matt!
posted by Roger Dodger at 10:48 AM on October 13, 2006