Dear Moderators
Over the past few days I have been plagued by freezing COTH forum pages, and some hideous screaming mechanized elf voice ( presumably from some advertisement) screeching out randomly? I can have a COTH tab open, but be viewing another tab, and that elf voice will screech out across my computer, with some Christmas music in the background. The offending ad seems to be for some Amazon product. I don’t know if the freezing pages are connected to the screaming elf voice-- but they seem to coincide.
It was suggested I post here to let you know.
I only experience the screaming elf voice on COTH or if I have COTH pages open… thankfully it does not seem to follow me to other internet sites.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Sunflower
It does help if you can identify the ad which is causing the problem.
This has been an intermittent problem recently.
The freezing pages, or the freezing pages plus the screaming elf voice? Like I said, it seems to come from some Amazon ad. It hasn’t happened since I complained about it…if it happens again I will try to catch the elf and see what advert it is coming from.
When the page “freezes” and/or you hear the “screaming elf” see if you can determine what ads are displaying - at some point there should be some common thread and that would be the guilty party.
The screaming elf voice just returned. These are the ads on COTH at the moment: a SmartPak ad, Adequan, Blue Bridle and Playstation. The Playstation has a video that plays while the others do not, making the Playstation ad the likely culprit for the screaming elf voice.The screaming elf voice comes with background Christmas music and then cuts off abruptly. No page freeze this time, just the screaming elf.
And no sooner do I post, another episode of screaming elf. This time there is no Playstation video, it has been replaced by another advert video for Ali Express… in the same place that the Playstation video was. There is no other video advertisement on the page.
:disgust::disgust: No sooner did I click on COTH than did I hear that screaming elf voice. :disgust::disgust: Looking at the adverts, only one this time had a video, this seems to be something called Mothercare?
:grief::disgust: Well, I guess that COTH has successfully thwarted the screaming elf advertisement. Thank you COTH. But horror of horrors the thing has turned up outside of COTH. Which is not COTH’s problem, it just means I will spend more time over here now as it is elf free.
Sunflower, you are correct that the issue you are experiencing isn’t restricted to COTH unfortunately.
Do you run an ad blocker?
This won’t banish the elf, but when you hear it, do you notice that your browser tab has an icon that looks like a speaker with sound waves on it? If so, click it and it should mute the sound on that page.
Actually, here’s a tutorial about how to mute tabs in various browsers that might be helpful. Why does any advertiser think an ad like that is a good idea? :sigh:
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@Moderator 1 thanks for the tip on the sound on the browser tab (didn’t know that 
).
As to why… I suspect because the advertiser still gets buckets of clicks from people who don’t realize they really ought not to be clicking on ads in their quest to shut them up :lol:
Thanks for the tips on the sound on each tab-- really helpful. That screaming elf… ugh…
annnnnddd… the screaming elf is back. it burst out screaming sort of randomly and made me jump so hard my laptop nearly flew to the floor. it seems to be coming from a COTH page again. I go to turn off the volume in the tab, but the volume button vanishes when I click over to the COTH page. The elf scream seems to get choked off in a second or two-- perhaps a filter catches it and cuts off the offending advertisement? I have just turned all my sound off for now.
The last hour something has been freezing the pages, about five or six times now?
Is there a new ad maybe doing that?
I can’t tell, the page is frozen, so can’t scroll down to see.
I am not sure COTH can do anything about that, if it is some of those personalized ads Google sticks in the ad bar on the right?
COTH doesn’t has anything to do about those, would be hard to filter them for this web site, I think.
I went to Google and de personalized all of my ads. That seems to have kept the elf away from me again for awhile ( fingers crossed).
Good, will try that later, thanks for the tip.
