The GeoPop Page

Geopops

Top Effects on computer system Disabling the infernal GeoPop Geopop Songs Page Caught in the Act! (GIF Screenshot) Geopop Crash Test

GeoPops are annoying, intrusive ad windows that pop up every time you visit a non-Geoplus GeoCities homepage that does not have a Geoguide on it. For those of you who, by some strange and friendly act of God, have never seen a GeoPop advertisement, let me briefly describe the experience: You see this homepage you want to visit, either on another site, Web search (Yahoo, the one that has not yet banned GeoCities pages) or whatever. Then you see it's a GeoCities page. "Oh, great...," you think, because you know what's coming. Geopops. Lots and lots of Geopops. So after careful consideration, you decide to forge ahead and visit this page anyway, come what may. You click the link.
KaBoom!
You've been popped! What do you do now? You try closing the annoying, intrusive ad window that has just popped up on your screen. Unfortrunately,

below

try

So after several minutes you have solved your GeoPop dilemma for now. But others are not so lucky. Those of us not using The Magic Computer will sooner or later (mostly, sooner) suffer some sort of computer misbehaviors such as the following as a result of unstable Geo ads. Most common is the 'illegal operation', where your hard drive suddenly makes a nifty sound effect R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip! and a box not unlike the following appears:
This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.

This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.

At this point your browser crashes, you make a nifty sound effect of your own %@&#!! and throw your modem through the window of your choice. Or, if you're like me, you may get the egregious Blue Screen of Death, at which point your PC is fuuudged:
A fatal exception has occurred... (Screen generated with Phony Fatal)

A fatal exception has occurred... (Screen generated with Phony Fatal)

Now doesn't that beautiful shade of blue just make you feel soooo peaceful and relaxed? Good, because when you reboot your computer (and you most definitely will) you will get a ScanDisk screen with a list of all the disk errors the GeoPop and subsequent crash have inflicted on your C:\ drive.
See Popup Crash Demo to see if you're vulnerable...

Ah, memories GDI resources

Let's face it, Windows does not know how to handle memory usage. It's like an overweight kleptomaniac in a Dunkin' Donuts. Each GeoPop window that System Load

is forced upon you drains away Windows' system and GDI memory. You cannot recover this memory by clicking the GeoPop away. It's just gone. Eventually, so much memory has been lost that your computer becomes sluggish and unstable; eventually it will crash as a result. Until this happens, the GeoPop is also leeching away application memory, causing Windows to swap portions of itself and in-memory applications to your hard disk to make room. This activity eats most of your processing resources and makes things even more sluggish. If I was a computer, I woudn't like these things either. (Hmm, do ya System CPU Usage

suppose the computer is crashing itself on purpose, just to spite you? 'Make me do Geopops, will ya? I'll show you what happens to people who make me do pops'...R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rip!)

In a letter I wrote to GeoCities' general manager I explained my concerns about popup window advertising (Be sure to see his reply). A portion of this message follows...

...I have nothing against advertising and I understand

it is GeoCities' primary means of support. But I also feel there must be

better ways of doing it than the interstitial and GeoPop ads that are

currently being tested. Specifically, the interstitials and popup ads

are a terrible mistake and I sincerely hope you do not continue to use

them. I'm sorry for the length of this message, but there's a lot to be

said, especially about the popup ads:

1) They are intrusive: Unlike a conventional ad, these *require*
interaction and a special effort to deal with. I personally find them so
annoying that I will not visit any GeoCities pages that display them,
including my own guestbook, and I am sure many others find them equally
annoying.
2) They are ineffective: Viewers such as myself close these things the
instant they appear, long before any ad is displayed. Due to the
annoyance factor, viewers of the ad may feel angered by and resentful of
any company that would advertise in this way, and some GeoCities members
have gone so far as to propose a boycott of all companies who advertise
using intrusive methods such as the popup windows. Case in point: I
admit it, I clicked
one of those GeoGuide banners for Surplus Direct, and saw they had some
pretty good deals on equipment I needed. But when I started to receive
junk ('spam') emails from them, I immediately changed my mind. When they
refused to stop sending it and ignored all my requests to be left alone
I was downright pissed off, so much so that I organized a boycott of
this company. (BTW, your 'Content Cops' had all 68 pages of my GeoCities
site deleted for it.)
*3) These ads crash computers. Even when they don't, each window that
pops up drains away a small chunk of Windows' system/GDI memory that is
never recovered...over time, the system becomes sluggish and unstable.
The GeoPops especially cause problems ranging from applications errors
to system-wide crashes. Several popup windows, when I closed them,
caused my computer to lockup with a 'bluescreen' error, in which the
Windows GUI is replaced with a blue text screen with an error message
and the computer stops responding. After rebooting, victims are greeted
with another screen listing all the disk errors that have resulted from
this crash, or ultimately, your sponsor's advertisement. I have a pretty
good idea of how a person feels after one of these, having contacted
Egghead Computers expressing my 'gratitude' about the 30+ clusters their
ad caused me to lose on my hard drive and asking them to consider a
different method of advertising on GeoCities.
...

Disabling GeoPops on your browser
To keep them from appearing on your browser, turn JavaScript off. The method for doing this is different for every browser; if you don't know how, consult the help files that came with it or just look around in the settings menus and you'll probably find it. And please don't ask me how to turn JavaScript off for xxx browser, I don't know how, and am not willing to download the browser so I can find out for you! Note that turning off JavaScript will cause you to miss out on popup alerts and those annoying scrolling text thingys that show up in the status bar of your browser.
Disabling GeoPops on your own GeoCities pages One of the best ways, one which I personally recommend is just to put a GeoGuide on the page. Details on how to do this can be found in the ~~GeoGuide FAQ.~~
For those who do not want to add GeoGuides to every page, or for some pages where it is impractical to do so (pages like this with about 5 characters of text on them), open the page in a text editor or GeoCities file editor and scroll all the way down. Add either of the following at teh very end of the document, after the </HTML> (Please note that doing this is against the GeoCities ~~Content Guidelines~~) :

<NOSCRIPT>
<SCRIPT Language="Sanskrit">

If you use an HTML editor (such as HoTMetaL, MS Frontpage or Netscape Composer) and find that your pages no longer block popups, you will have to edit them manually afterward to fix the disabler tags. Putting things after the </HTML> is considered a no-no, and most HTML editors will either move or delete these tags.

For those of you who just don't like having to close the damn things, ~~Paul Hsieh~~ has come up with a Java script that will automatically close the popup window after a specific period of time. This can be put anywhere on the page. Be sure to use in combination with one of the above methods to avoid multiple pops...:

<script LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

<!--

var timerID=null;

var adfuscate=null;

// Be sure to change the pageID=/gpf/SiliconValley and

// w3adBAAAIAQJ to match what appears in the popup code on your

// own pages

// The width=1 and height=1 here make the popup window as small

// as possible. To keep a normal-size popup, change the width to

// 515 and height to 125

adfuscate=window.open("http://www.geocities.com/cgi-bin-local/GeoAD?pageID=/gpf/SiliconValley","w3adBAAAIAQJ","width=1,height=1,alwaysLowered=yes,dependent=yes,titlebar=yes");

timerID = setTimeout('if( adfuscate!=null){adfuscate.close();};clearTimeout(timerID);',4000);

// The number 4000 here lets the window show for about 4 seconds

// (1000= about 1 sec.). A larger number will make the ad show

// longer, a smaller number will close it more quickly.

//-->

</script>

(The idea is to surrupticious pre-load the window, get a handle to it then send a delayed message to close it soon. The "w3adBAAAIAQJ" is probably web page specific, and thus must be changed for each geocities member.)
You will have to use this in combination with <NOSCRIPT> or <SCRIPT language="bogus"> because it pops up its own window independently of GeoCities code. Otherwise, you will have TWO popups, and one won't go away on its own.

(You may have to scroll to the right to see all of it. Some comments have been added to the code for the Java-impaired; you can remove anything in red without affecting the script's function.)

And as long as you're here, why not read about GeoCities Corp.'s numerous attempts to keep you from reading this page by having it censored even on servers it does not own...

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