[BalladOfStruth]

Morning guys,

This one’s for the staff/admins.

I made the mistake of visiting the site on mobile today, and there’s a really irritating layout issue that made me give up trying to use the site entirely.

You’ve got an autoplay video that’s probably in a sticky-div or something, so that it remains static onscreen when you scroll past it. If you absolutely insist on doing this, can you at least snap it somewhere other than the top left, obscuring the homepage button and menu, which renders the site borderline-unusable?

Cheers.

 

Firefox 109.0, iPhone Xs, iOS 16.0.2

Topic

[BalladOfStruth]

Rich_cb wrote:

Rich_cb wrote:

It seems universally unpopular.

I think it might actually be the least popular behaviour in all of web design.

[BalladOfStruth]

Yeah, obviously running ads

Yeah, obviously running ads are a source of income for the site, so I fully understand why they do it, but introducing ads to a website is a balancing act of ad real-estate and maintaining the user experience. As soon as the inclusion of ads affects the user experience, out comes the ad-blocker.

I’d suggest the Road.cc admins have a quick look at Nielsen’s usability heuristics. Forcing the user to close autoplay videos that cover site menus and read around banner ads that cover ~1/3rd of the viewport are not among them.

Suffice to say, I adblock this site.

[Rich_cb]

I’ve tried to hold off using
I’ve tried to hold off using an ad blocker on here as I also don’t object to a reasonable amount of advertising.

Any more ‘upgrades’ and I’ll be reconsidering that decision.

[Rich_cb]

You could always scrap the
You could always scrap the autoplay video feature altogether?

It seems universally unpopular.

[wycombewheeler]

this site is only usable from

this site is only usable from work as the company has adblockers

But then EVERY link in comments is flagged (due to some sort of data scraping I think) work around is to right click, inspect link and then click the link from there.

I don’t object to a reasonable amount of advertising for using the website, but when the ads make the site unusable…

[BalladOfStruth]

Yeah, this website is a

Yeah, this website is a pretty horrible experience without an adblocker.

[Awavey]

Ive been finding its next to

Ive been finding its next to unusable, Im guessing its some adsense thing either running an ad, or stealing a bunch of resources to load the ad.

[BalladOfStruth]

Cheers Jack, thanks for

Cheers Jack, thanks for addressing it so quickly.

[PRSboy]

And another thing… on the

And another thing… on the mobile site via Firefox it can take an age to be able to click in the text box to get the cursor to write a comment. 
 

[Jack Sexty]

Hi there, 

Hi there, 

Sorry about this, we’ve now moved the autoplay vid so it’s on the right hand side so it doesn’t obscure the homepage menu or dropdown. You might find you’re unable to close it on mobile at the moment but we’re working on a fix, apologies again. 

[Author]

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