Dear Angus, about ads....

Hi

That you don't want adblockers on your website is fine with me - ads help pay for things. But modal ads (esp on the "Downloads" page) are just too intrusive. And, click on the wrong bit by mistake, and you open yourself up to god knows what.

Please, please, stop with them.

Thanks Phil

My problem just now was that it keeps complaining I have an ad blocker installed when I don't. So I (long-time user and donor) get both the ads (including the modals) and the annoying ad blocker warnings.

Please note you can right-click the downloads and click "Save as..".

Please note you can right-click the downloads and click "Save as..".

True - and thanks, but really, modal ads are a big no-no, IMO. They really should have no place on any website.

Should be better now. I disabled these "vignette" ads.

Wow, thanks! As ( say, ads per se aren't a problem, just the full page / modal ones.

I notice that (now? did I not notice before?) that a lot pages (Downloads, Images and Help for starters) have a large amount of whitespace below the header... is this related? Have you disabled more ads than you realised - as in fact I can't see any now!!

I also activated a consent dialog provided from Google. You should have seen that, any maybe you clicked on "do not consent" - then that could be the reason why you're not seeing ads any more.

Maybe - I probably assumed it was a cookies consent box. Oh dear, I feel guilty now! I don't want to upset your income stream, just to get rid of the most intrusive ads.

It's a bit weird... I cleared my cookies/cache ad reloaded./.. and up popped the Google consent box. It asks for consent to

heidisql.com asks for your consent to use your personal data to show:

"Personalised advertising and content, advertising and content measurement, audience research and services development"

which to me implies that if I refuse them I will still get ads, just not targeted to me. But in fact, if I click "Do not consent" then I don't see any ads at all.

I can't believe that's how it supposed to work...

Yes, that's what I thought as well. And then it's probably normal that Google cannot guarantee ads to be non-personalized probably, because the providers create cookies themselves. No clue, I am not that deep into this stuff. But indeed Google AdSense tells me for displaying ads in Europe I would have to create a consent dialog which is accepted by Google... I tested that dialog yesterday (you saw it), and the income went down to a lousy euro per day. So I am probably better off when disabling the ads for whole Europe. Will see.

Google really can be a pain, can't they? They don't exactly go out of their way to be helpful.

I cleared my cookies in Firefox - and see ads.

Did the same in Vivaldi and in Chrome, and don't see any.

In all of them, I didn't see any "cookies consent" dialog...

(I am in Europe, btw - UK)

Yes I removed the consent dialog for now.

No ads in Chrome, that's a bit strange, as I see some there. But some others said so too. Well, perhaps due to a browser extension, I don't know.