confusion about this forum and I do not want to spam anybody this is new to me do not know how to get around in this learning to send out email but do not know how to receive them in this forum or if getting thru to anyone and My Name is Ray MCConnell and I do not have popup is blocked on my computer and I had that done because could never get anything done because of those popups......yea I am involed in a few networking and I do listen and go to other sites .....but I am also committed to mine........ my addresss is maybe2right2003@yahoo.com that is the email I know how to read and send off...... I do not know if I receiving email from anyone on this forum so is there anyway I can send one email to the whole group and the ones that wants to keep in touch can and the ones who does not doesn't have to answer..... anyway got to go now keep in touch .......ray

Hello, I found pop ups annoying also. Mary

Hello Mary I find the new (?) pop ups very irritating, and wish they were somewhere else on the page. However, I do agree with Roger and Arthur to a certain extent - they are a reminder of forums going on and I can see that they may well help forum owners to attract interest. Sometimes forum invitations arrive very late - when they are nearly dying out sometimes. In spite of loathing them, I have actually used them twice today - forums I had forgotten all about. I'm not very clear on forum etiquette about joining a forum without being invited. If they are not "closed" or moderated forums I would imagine that a lot of forum owners would like to have new people join them. I think its ok as long as they are Adland members, and not ok if anyone on the internet can post. But as I haven't yet started a forum, I'm probably not the best person to answer that one. Saludos Jenny

Thanks Mary for starting this thread. Kathy has notified me about it and I have read all the posts. Some of you say those pop-ups are annoying and some of you say they are useful. As we are working on this new feature, we will be adding more options. E.g way to disable them permanently, only allow popups from forums which one is interested in. The main purpose of this pop-ups is to show where the action is to currently logged members. Some newer members don't know how to use the site and what is it about. Such pop-ups will take them right where somebody is posting and potentially where live discussion takes place. In addition new members can't attract others to view their posts. Pop-ups like this allow them on attracting currently logged users to view their posts. Pop-ups are also rewarding those who post new posts. We want our site to be useful to everyone and are working on adding more powerful features all the time. My main concern is that site doesn't lose the speed. As some of you have noticed, the site became slow when we first introduced this idea about a week ago. We identified that additional traffic caused by maintaining those pop-ups pushed our bandwidth limits to the max. We have since then made some improvements to the technology and are working on additional ideas so speed of the site is not affected. I would be interested to know if you are seeing any degradation of the speed over last two days or any other problems with the site. One another indication of the effect of the popups is that we are observing currently at each given time over 120 people logged in, whereas before popups we were averaging around 70. This itself is a good indicator that those popups are bringing users attention and encourage them to participate in discussions about which they would be not aware. Now to your note Mary regarding the fact that you felt that joining a forum to which you are not invited would be not polite. Keep in mind that system only allows to invite to the forum those who are on your friend's list. You are just not invited to some of the forums because you are not on those people friend's list. Any feedback is appreciated as always. And thanks again for starting this thread. Bogdan Fiedur

Hello Anamaria, Yes, that is how I feel too. I hate to leave what I am doing. It seems easier to go to the e-mails at my leisure rather than to rush off to catch the pop up. If one has a small friends list by design, most of the pop ups will be by unknown people. If one chooses to be a part of just a few select forums then pop ups won't pull you away from your work. Thanks for stopping by