Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mechanical_fish | Hacker News Reader

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mechanical_fish

I'm being attacked by an evil widget on this page. There is a big-ass Javascript popup, apparently perpetrated by something called "PostRank", that obscures the page on initial load (in Safari 3/Mac). It has a list of posts labeled "Top Posts", none of which are the one I want to read. I can't figure out how to make this thing go away -- there is no close box, and clicking inside it links me away to something else -- and when I scroll the damn thing follows me to make very sure that I never get a glimpse of the actual post. I can't see around it.

Words cannot express how infuriating that widget is. It's like Snap.com only more evil. Banish it back to the nether regions from whence it came and submit this post again so I can actually read it.

UPDATE: Seriously, I can't get rid of it. Clicking inside it, clicking outside it, the Escape key, nasty words about its mother -- nothing works. I even tried following one of its links, and the resulting page had the same obscuring widget on it. Who designs the UI for these things?

I'll try restarting Safari.

FURTHER UPDATE: Nope, it's out of excuses. That is officially the suckiest non-musical widget I've ever seen.

Thanks to everyone who brought this to my attention. The widget should be gone now for everyone.

Somewhat ironically, all of this complaining got the post to the front page of Hacker News. Next time I'll have to do it on the merit of the post, alone.

Wow, that thing sucks. It completely obscures content on Chrome too.

[edit: It doesn't appear at all in Firefox 3.x/Win!]

webkit people can paste this into the address bar:

javascript:document.getElementById("sideposts").style.setProperty("display", "none");

It is fine in firefox but breaks in Chrome. I assume it is webkit. (Well not webkit, but the designer that didn't test in webkit.)

Yes, there was some problem with that page earlier such that it wouldn't display at all to me. (There was an error message that implied the server was overwhelmed.) Now I see a lot of spammy blog content, which I'm not sure is an improvement, but I did think this part

"Robb claims that as 'there is reason to believe that costs of higher education (direct costs and lost income) are now nearly equal (in net present value) to the additional lifetime income derived from having a degree' this situation has all the earmarks of a bubble."

Have college costs risen so steeply that there is now no economic rationale (from increased lifetime income) to seek a college degree?

I think that the widget was originally offered as an ordinary widget, but the site owner placed it in that Gawd-Awful(tm) popup thingy.

I get it too. Make it stop -.-

The widget is also in the way on Opera 9.60.

Develop menu ->Disable JavaScript.

Dude, firefox.

Also, Safari Adblock, it's not terrible.

Safari Adblock wouldn't help at all with this widget problem.

Also, Safari Adblock's crap. If you really want to block ads, use http://glimmerblocker.org/

The site has pretty bad usability with About page as well. You can't even see close/next/previous links on pages.

lol; random. someone have a screenshot?

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