[mitchell_pgh]

I think there was just an audio ad at the top that said "You have been selected to win a free Apple iPod"

That's NOT cool at all.

Flash audio ads should be OPT IN only...

[dowNNshift]

Agreed, the same ad startled me too.... Quickly had to jam on the mute button. It's annoying that I have to browse MacNN with my Macs muted.

At times the advertising on this site is a double standard; one hand posting spam is forbidden and then on the other they allow spam-like ads in various places on the site.

<shaking head>

[Cold Warrior]

MacNN should make an ad server path of specially-filtered and approved ads: no audio, no racy content, no seizure-inducing animation. As it stands now, I block everything, but am sympathetic to MacNN and would whitelist them if they set up the special path I mentioned, e.g., .../ads/special/whitelist/ or similar.

[mkbhatia]

We do not allow audio ads at all (unless the user requests/initiates the audio. Unfortunately, audio-based flash ads are very difficult to track down. We use several third-party networks to fill our ad inventory and that makes it hard. If you click on the ad and watch your status/info bar at the bottom of the browser, you may be able to catch the first/second URL pass through. If you pass those along to me, I will be able to ban the ad automatically (and also speak to the network about quality assurance). Outside of that, a screenshot helps a bit, but in the absence of the intermediate URLs, the destination URL is probably most helpful.