Talk:1280: Mystery News

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
Revision as of 17:30, 21 October 2013 by 67.51.59.66 (talk)
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I would just like to take this moment to say that Explain xkcd's ads are restricted to image files only, and will never play video/sound/flash stuff when you load the page, unlike the site that Cueball currently has open. Davidy²²[talk] 06:59, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

This has to do with those news videos or live streams that pop up without your consent on some unreputable news sites. If you have a slow network and a lot of tabs, they're almost impossible to find. 66.87.66.186 13:47, 21 October 2013 (UTC)


This comic is so 2005; I'm guessing Randal is not using adblockplus (maybe due to a moral enforced by the income from his xkcd.com) 108.168.11.47 13:57, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

I'm guessing that he's not referring to audio ads, but rather to news sites that have a video and a story, but can sometimes take so long to load the video that you've read the story and moved on, or to the random sites that have the completely unrelated espn auto-play video in the sidebar. I personally installed an add-on that makes you have to click on a flash object solely for these annoyances.... 66.249.85.193 14:08, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

An alternative situation: I sometimes have the domains youtube.com and ytimg.com blocked by NoScript. Then I allow them to watch something and three or four videos in background tabs start playing... 83.41.36.244 14:41, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

This exact situation happens to me quite often. Here's the scenario: I scan the Google News homepage for today's news, and click the middle mouse button on the 5-10 stories that interest me, thus opening them up directly into background tabs, intending to read them one-by-one afterwards. If any of these articles have videos that autoplay, I start hearing random news reports without knowing which tab(s) the video is playing in, and have to frantically search through them to pause it. I'm pretty sure this is what Randall is referring to. 216.174.143.92 14:56, 21 October 2013 (UTC)

Yes, exactly. I often read a story which contains links to several others I'd like to read. So I open them in background tabs to get to after I finish the first story. And a few moments later some video on a tab (or several tabs) which I'm not looking at will start to play. Often it is difficult to find the tab(s) on which the video(s) is playing since, as noted above, the video is non-obvious. More often than not I find (if I can find it at all) that it's coming from some small ad running in a border area.
Very frustrating and often leads me to just turn down the sound and ignore the thing that's clamoring for my attention. Gets the advertiser exactly the opposite reaction from me than what they want. Very counter-productive for the advertiser. 67.51.59.66 17:29, 21 October 2013 (UTC)