For a while back in the noughts, the web was a well behaved place. Google had conquered advertising, there were no more popup, animated monstrosities flying across articles you wanted to read. Also, mobile hadn’t been invented, so no one thought they should push their mobile app on you.
But now, you go to sites and they harass you to click, sign up, anything except read what you came to read.
I feel like just leaving the site isn’t enough to express my displeasure. But actually commenting means signing up, or signing in with facebook, or some such other timewasting annoyance, playing yet more of the site’s games.
What if you could just say “No”, and then go?
I’ve built (*coff* hacked together *coff*) a chrome plugin called “No”. Install it and you’ll get a No button in your browser.
Then, when you’re on a site that’s annoying you, just click “No”. It’ll give you a list of pre-canned messages you can try.
Just click one, and it does two things:
First, it sends the message you select to the website you’re on.
It does this in a pretty geeky way. It simply calls the website again (does a GET for the technically inclined) and puts your message into the request (on the query string, again for the techies).
So this isn’t going to turn up as an email to anyone or anything like that. It’ll simple be noticable in the server logs for admins and anyone else who scrutinises these things. For example:
The second thing it does is to back you out of the offending site.
So, you leave the site immediately, and you leave a message just where the kinds of people who analyze a grubby site’s traffic will notice it.
Give it a shot, you can download it from the Chrome Web Store.
