There seems to be some confusion around my comments here. I get responses that mostly seem to say that site owners deserve what they get when they use obnoxious ads; and that posters will be damned if anyone tells THEM how to browse.

I disagree with neither of those. The point I was trying to make is that the web site owners have the /right/ to do whatever they want - including the posting of obnoxious, gouge-your-eyes-out advertisements. They even have the /right/ to try to force you to view those advertisements - this is their server, and they have control over how they want to run it.

I am not saying they will succeed in this - obviously there are many ways around any restriction in this open playground we call the Internet. But it is undeniably their /right/ - which is the only point I was making.

Conversely, you and I have the /right/ to control how we view those web pages. I use adblock, but will listen to a reasonable request to unblock ads. If a site uses evil ads (flash, java, java-script, animations) and tries to force me to view them, I tend to stop using the web site because a) it's no longer worth the aggravation of trying to circumvent - there is precious little content out there that I simply "must" have. b) if enough people do walk away, the provider has no choice but to reconsider his tactics.

But to reiterate my point - the content providers have the right to control what is on their web site. What we choose to do about it is up to us.

In the last few weeks, I've seen this error several times when I try to get to a slashdot article via RSS feed:

From what I've been able to see, when Google Analytics has an issue, it is actually preventing viewers from seeing the Slashdot site. I've been considering using it on a couple of my sites, but I have to say - this makes me nervous. Would I really be handing this much control over my readers' experience to Google if I started to use Analytics? Or is this 'feature' something that must specifically be enabled?