Okay, so the other day I'm making a post. I go into the Post box and start writing away. You know how there is a little text cursor to let you know where you are? Looks like a little vertical line. You can place it anywhere in your text with your mouse or you can use the four directional arrows to move it. It also flashes on and off with a frequency of approximately once per second. Trust me, there is a reason why I'm writing all this.

So anyway, I'm typing away and decide I need to move the cursor back several letters to make a correction. I push the left arrow and nothing seems to happen. Several seconds later the cursor appears somewhere way to the left of where I intended. It's almost as if there were a lag. So I get worried that it's a PC problem at my end.

Fast forward to today. It happens again. Suddenly I begin to notice that the cursor is flashing much slower than the aforementioned 1-per-second. In fact it is flashing exactly in time to the banner ad that you see in my included pics:




It's not doing it right now as I'm making this post, but then that particular Simware banner is not on this page at the moment. Notice that it changes its right-hand image from "Take On Helicopters" to one of a race car. Notice the little cursor is there for one image and not for the other. Has anyone else noticed this? Or is it that, "I'm going slightly mad, I'm going slightly mad, it's finally happened, happened." ?

This very well may be legitimate, but your description of the cursor jumping also reminds me of the fact that that tends to happen on laptops with touchpads, when you bump the pad accidentally. Chances are you aren't typing on a laptop with a touchpad, anyway,

I'm seeing the same thing, but had not correlated it to anything. I'll watch for the same banner...

I'm using desktop puters with regular keyboards. I notice it more when I'm at home in the evenings.

The problem is not happening now, with the Cessna controls banner on display.

WC

Thanks Wrecking Crew. Nice to know I'm not the only one.

:-) letterboy1

Happened again - at home, writing a PM to Viper - here's a screen shot of the banner ads that were showing. Interesting thing is after the screen shot the problem of the unresponsive cursor went away.

Only other open tab in IE8 is Google home page.

WC

Well, on the one hand I would say "Who cares?" if it were a rare occurrence. But if this is a trend related to some Flash or Java glitch, it might begin to irritate more posters.

Well, I think SimHQ is slow to respond as of late.

I'll click on a thread and my IE8 says "waiting for SimHQ" and I get impatient and click the link again and it goes. I don't get this behaviour on the other sites that are also open in the same browser.

When I saw this thread I figured what you said - if others are seeing this then we can report it in hopes of tracking it down.

And there are some posts about the banner ads being related to the post content. That I have noticed on other sites, too.

I am running Microsoft's new Security Essentials for anti-virus - I dropped McAfee - and I'm not running anything else, like SpyBot. Wondering if I should run a SpyBot on this Win 7 Pro?

WC

I think its an issue with the banner adds. I tested this in a Firefox browser session that has add blocking enabled and its not happening. Was what you saw, I saw last in IE 9....just dismissed it as I'm new to this site.

For me what made me look into this a little more was today when I went to the "My Stuff" drop down menu and could not see any selections in the area of where the banner add was (ghosted out). I was just looking to checking out the user preferences and such. Logged out of the forums in IE 9, opened up Firefox with add blocking, navigated to this site, logged in and the issue wasn't there.

Not trying to tell anyone to not support the site by using add blocking, but when you have issues like this make the switch and report the issue.

I could be completely wrong with what you describe based on not knowing all your details but see if things change with add blocking............that will confirm things for you. If it does the admins will want to fix this as they do not want people browsing the site with add blocking.

In response...

Nothing we can do to keep people from turning on ad blocking on SimHQ. But if enough people block ads then there will not be a site. That is not meant to be a threat but stating fact. Direct ads and other ads (in addition to user support) help keep the site hosting and technical expenses covered. Without the income of the ads, we would have three choices.

- Make SimHQ a pay site which will not happen.
- Operate as a personal expense and operating loss.
- Closure of the site.

The first two options are not going to happen.

In turn, readers should expect to come here and not have to deal with the crap described in this thread.

Nobody is more aggravated about it than I am.

We're going crazy (crazier) trying to get this sorted out. And trust me hours and hours have been spent diagnosing and working with it.

In the interim, and for a brief period of time, we have turned-off all ads in the forums other than direct placement advertisers.

In turn, I would ask that you take shields down with ad blocking so our direct placement advertisers get realistic numbers. If you still see the banner ads at the bottom of pages, press Ctrl + F5 to load an new page without the ads.

Alternately, if you feel strongly about using an ad blocker, please "white list" our URLs: www.simhq.net and www.simhq.com.

Thank you all for your patience.

- Doug

guod, does SimHQ receive more revenue if ads are clicked on?

It can make a difference.

Hi Guod, I do use adblocking as it helps save bandwidth and decrease loading times on my sub-standard Australian internet connection.

However I will do as you ask and whitelist SimHQ. I don't have any problems with this as I find the ads on SimHQ are at least tasteful and appropiate to their target audience, and they aren't too intrusive to the usage of the site.

I will add that you should consider creating some sort of premium member scheme, I'm sure many users of the site would be happy to pay some contributions. I know I would.

I think that is a bad idea personally. You'll probably put off more users than you would have subscribe. It opens up a huge can of worms when you have some members on a paid scheme, and others free. It would be better just to have a "Donate" button with PayPal or something similar. That way your generous members can give whatever they are comfortable with, at their own leisure, without the negative aspects of a paid/free member divide.

Just my 2 cents for what it is worth.

Well it seems to work ok for World of Tanks.

Just for clarification, my only purpose in making note of this was for Guod's benefit so he could look into it. I have not encountered anything so far that makes me want to block ads. I'm sure this can be worked out. For my part, I support advertising. It's worked ever since commercial radio and TV and it can work here.

This option already exists:
http://www.simhq.com/_aboutus/aboutus.html#support

You can reach this page by clicking on the yellow "I want to support SimHQ" banner that lives at the bottom right of the homepage.

guod -
Let us know what we can do to help solve this problem.

Anyone else who gets a slow response - try a screen shot with Print Screen and see if that clears it up for you right away.

WC

There is a yellow button on the lower right corner of the SimHQ home page just for that. Click "I want to help SimHQ".

(thanks Joe)

I want to make sure everyone understands I am not ticked at hearing from readers only that it is a problem for them. Yes, I am aggravated at the situation but not readers. I need to know whe you're having problems, appreciate knowing, and sorry you're having it happen.

Why don't you just set up a bank account that we can do an international transfer to? - *That would really be good.