RanGen Usability/Ad Network Testing Zone
Here be dragons...
To all you brave souls/poor fools who dare set foot in here, welcome!
Getting straight to the point, I've created this area to test how a few new ad networks perform and what effect they have on user experience and site usability.
TLDR: Please turn off your ad-blocker, click through the next few pages, and answer the 3 questions on each page. If you get stopped by redirects along the way, come back here and move forward using the links in the "Trouble with repeated redirects?" section at the end of this post.
"I don't need no details!" - Want to stumble into the Danger Zone? Click using the link below.
Click here to jump right in. (Please read the details...)Want some details?
RanGen is supported by a few wonderful Patrons (jooooin theeemmm...), but primarily by ad revenue.
When browsing I tend to avoid ads where possible, but I do disable my ad-blocker on certain sites where I wish to give the creators extra support, and/or where the ads aren't too intrusive.
For those of you who have disabled yours on RanGen (or don't use one at all!) I thank and salute you; you are helping RanGen stay afloat!
While the number of visitors is steadily increasing, the revenue from my current ad networks has fallen, so I'm trying out some new ones. One in particular seems quite promising, but apparently some advertisers use some pretty forceful methods to display their ads.
As I mentioned, I don't like intrusive ads, and there's only so many times a visitor can be clotheslined by popups and redirects before they decide to leave. My initial testing resulted in a lot of people, myself included, experiencing a lot of redirects and scam-style popups and alerts, to the point where some people thought the site had been hacked! In the worst cases, it made it impossible to even access the site at all, because the user would be immediately redirected away.
My goal is to test out all the ads and settings in a contained environment, and see if I can filter out those aggressive ads and any unsavoury types, and learn more about what you, the user, are willing to tolerate; apparently, the general public is a lot more tolerant of various ad types than I am, so I might be being a bit more uptight than I need to be!
For this, I have created a series of simple pages that each display a different ad type from the new provider (in addition to my original, tame ads around the edges of the page). All you need to do, dear visitor, is just make sure your ad-blocker is off, then click through each page and tell me what you thought or what your experience was for each one.
You are not required to interact with any of the ads at all, but you can if something genuinely interests you; the main purpose of this is just to see how they passively affect your experience.
If you get redirected away from RanGen without clicking anything, and especially if you end up on pages claiming your device has a virus, has been hacked, is locked, or if you see any "!!IMPORTANT! Click here to XYZ!!" type messages, do not click on them! Instead, close the page and try to get back to it following the links again. If you can't get past certain points, come back here to let me know that you got redirected, then click on one of the links below to skip that page and move on to the next.Optional step - Reporting scammy ads
If you'd like to help me report this nonsense, before you close the tab, take a screenshot of the page you were redirected to (be sure to get the URL) and send me a message via the contact form near the bottom of the page; please include the following information;
- The time and date when you saw the redirected page
- Your device type (mobile, tablet, browser, TV, etc)
- Your device's operating system
- The country you're in
- Your browser and its version
And that's it! Thank you again for volunteering; I really appreciate it. 🥰
"Alright, I'm ready!" - Enter the Danger Zone!Trouble with repeated redirects?
If you got repeatedly redirected on a specific page, or want to skip around, use these links:
