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Comment by cakeface | Hacker News Reader

The sneakiest thing just happened to me on that Washington Post site. There was an overlay ad, no big deal, with an X to close it in the upper right of the screen. I moved my mouse up there to click the X and the site shifted slightly so what I actually clicked was "Subscribe"!

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During careful A/B testing, this site-modification has proven to increase the 'subscribe'-click ratio from 0.002% to 80% Which self-conscious mid-manager would say no to that?

Relevant commit strip: http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2017/02/16/the-dark-side-of-co...

Couldn't reproduce.

Different A/B test group? Or could just be that the site is hot garbage, every time I reload the banner/overlay ad and top bar behave slightly differently, I can see how that could happen but I couldn't get it to do quite what you've seen after like 20 reloads.

I see that on sites all the time. I assume it's just the layout shifting because the page retrieves stuff whose dimensions it doesn't know in advance. It used to happen with images all the time; now it happens with XHR.

This is why I disable javascript on my laptop and block ads on my iphone. I shouldn't have to chase around advert-closing buttons that's jinking like a high-performance fighter aircraft.

If you run Firefox on Android, you can use the NoScript extension there as well.

Sadly, Firefox for iOS is just a wrapper around WebKit, so Firefox extensions do not work there.

Firefox Reader view has been my savior both on laptops and on my mobile phone. It doesn't work on every page, but where it does, it removes the styling and JavaScript and I get to concentrate on the content.

In chrome dev tools, delete the first 2 div's under the <body> tag, then highlight <body> and in the css pane disable the element style for overflow-y: hidden;

YMMV depending on platform :)

In many sites, hitting the ESC key will dismiss those overlays.

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