Using GB on a phone is miserable

It's basically been since the takeover. See attached image.

When you load any thread in the forum, you get a big fat full screen ad that you need to refresh to get rid of.

I get that you need to make money, but the user experience shouldn't take the bullet because of it.

What phone/browser are you using? I am on an ancient iPhone X using Safari and while I do get the pop up ads they have an "X" at the upper right that can be used to close them, which seems like it might be cut off on you screen.

yeah, its not as bad as kotaku, but it's moving in that direction.

i usually can find the 'X' but occasionally it doesn't render properly, and you just need to refresh the page.

the podcast feed is getting pretty brutal with programmatic ads too. i know it depends on luck of the algorithm and/or your region- but having conversations get cut off every 15min by a Dunkin Donuts ad jingle isn't awesome.

Ads are 99% of why I just drop content, here and elsewhere. The automatic ads for monstrous republicans running for office in my state on the Fire Escape Cast are why I won’t ever listen to it again. Conan’s podcast is a little better since he does those himself, but he does so many of them there feels like there is less podcast than ad. Even back in the day, Neil Degrasse Tyson’s Star Talk podcast was so bloated with ads I just couldn’t enjoy it. I stopped listening to the bombcast when Jess left, but sounds like it’s a similar deal now.

The best way to do it is one of the oldest podcasts, WTF with Marc Maron. He does them himself and gets them out of the way in the front and back of the show. I get that mid roll ads pay more, but the when it gets so bad it’s the reason you lose listenership, then it’s having literally the opposite effect you want

@tartyron: Political ads for horrible people in inappropriate media is just the worst. I'm fortunate in that in my state most of the "political" ads you get are public health advisories about how to get vaccinated or the number for a smoking cessation hotline. Those I can handle.

The effect you want from ads is to make money. If you lose a third of your audience but make twice as much per person then you're still coming out ahead. At least in the short term.

That being said, Giant Bomb does offer multiple ways to avoid the most obnoxious ads. The premium subscription should get rid of almost all ads (though apparently there have been issues with the premium podcast) but if you have Youtube Premium you can also watch the video content there and won't get any ads. These aren't free but the website does have to make money. I do wish the site ads were less obnoxious but my understanding is that ad rates on "normal" web ads have tanked and you only really get paid for the obnoxious horrible ones. Of course obnoxious horrible ads make me personally less likely to buy whatever is being advertised but apparently someone thinks they work for someone.

If you all reports ad you don't like because of the content or how they're displaying and provide screenshots I can send it over to the ads team.

You should email them about it. They probably would want to know about this so they can tell their ads provider to stop this from happening. Patrick Klepek has talked about how if the podcast hosts aren't actively doing the ads themselves then it can be really frustrating because the awful ads always sneak through no matter how many filters they put on for types of ads and that they need to know about it so they can talk to the right people to get it fixed.

To clarify something dtoast may or may not have brought up before, there should be no political ads on any Giant Bomb related podcast. If you are getting political ads, send an email to support@giantbomb.com or report them to the site's Zendesk domain. Try to include the title and numbering for the podcast and a timestamp for when the ad appeared.

Full-screen ads are often caused by specific apps that you have downloaded. To fix this, you can identify the culprit app and uninstall it. Sometimes, ads leave a record in your recent apps overview. You can check this by pressing the recent apps/multitasking button right after encountering an ad. If you find a card with the ad, you can tap on the info icon to see which app it opens.

here's an example of an ad misbehaving- this is in mobile chrome on a pixel 4a 5G; refresh fixed but the page was otherwise locked out.

Say what you will about the ads. I, for one, am happy that Fandom cares enough to heavily advertise for an anti-vaping campaign.

So like... Is anything going to be done about them? Or are we just acknowledging them and moving on again?

As @dtoast indicated above, you can report ads that are displaying in a manner that makes site navigation disruptive or difficult by taking a screenshot and indicating your mobile device and it will be directed to the ad team.

After getting acquired by Fandom the state of the website as a whole has been miserable. It is especially funny when considering that GB has been shitting on Gawker/Kotaku and other websites but in the process have become a essentially an example on how make people hate the internet.

Absolutely NOTHING will be done because quality control for Fandom-owned websites does not exist.

@nikyuningen: yeah, this is pretty par for the course, sadly. Every Fandom website is borderline unusable on my phone unless I switch to Firefox. It's a mess. I love here how you can click on a forum post and it just reloads the page but now with half of it as an ad. Good stuff, Fandom.

double ads have started to creep in on mobile. i think this officially starts the countdown until we achieve autoplay videos.

Since I subscribe to YouTube premium, I only watch giant bomb content there since it’s ad free. The few times I check out the forum here I always get these full screen ads and it’s a huge turn off. The few times I click on a video here I get at least a 30 second ad up front and I just end up closing the video before it starts and move on with my day. I know they are just trying to make money but it gets in the way.

Not reading the rest of the thread so it may have been covered, but it does not seem to be possible to start a new List on mobile.