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johndmuller
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Capitol Hill, Colony of DC
Feb 2001
time: 00:21
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I've been using Outlook Express for my e-mail, and it has a split screen view where on top are the list of messages and on the bottom is a view of the beginning of the selected message. When I get one of those notification messages that advise me that a thread (that I'm subscribed to) has had a new reply, I can select the message in the upper window and then click on the link in the message in the bottom of the screen, which will open the appropriate forum to the new message - very convenient  .
However, advertising links have been showing up in these messages  .
At first, it was just a matter of having to look closer to make sure of clicking on the right link, but more and more lines of advertising links and extra decorative stuff keep turning up to the point now where it is necessary to scroll the bottom window to get to the link to the thread, which is, after all, the point of the message. Up to a certain point, I was able to handle it by changing the size ratios between the upper and lower windows, but now there are 3 ads taking up 9 lines at the beginning of the message, and since the link to the forum is not right at the top of the message, there are then some lines of message before the link too, and in order to fit all that into the bottom half of the screen, the bottom half is now the bottom 3/4 and is dominating the screen, leaving too little space on top for the message list  .
So, in order to have a decent sized message list (and I'm using 1024 x 768, a reasonable resolution), I have had to resign myself to scrolling the bottom half of the screen  to get to the link - or else give up using the feature all together.
Now putting the ads at the bottom of the message instead of the top would make me happy, but it wouldn't make real good advertising sense. On the other hand, keeping things the way they are gives me a  negative attitude toward those advertisers every time I have to scroll down the window to get to the link. That does not make me favorably disposed toward buying any of that stuff. Maybe advertising science has concluded that even negative name recognition is good for sales, but not from me it isn't.
A reasonable compromise is in order - reformat the page so it doesn't waste so much space  .
You could lose the borders, the line above the ads that says:
--------------------------------Ad--------------------------------
and its cousin beneath the ads which says:
------------------------------------------------------------------
could easily be dropped, or replaced with just "Ad: " on the left of each line.
You could put the ad text and the link on the same line, and while you're at it, disguise or pretty up the links themselves, which contain ugly looking web page path elements which (especially when underlined and in bright blue) distract the eye from the name of the product you're trying to sell.
You could do the same with the thread link itself: put it on the same line as the text "The thread is located at:".
As much as the "Hello JohnDMuller," greeting is a nice touch, you could save two more lines by just combining that into the beginning of the actual message.
If you did all that stuff, I think it would remove 8 lines from the beginning of the message, plenty enough savings to allow someone to use a moderatly small message window at the bottom of the screen and still be able to click on the link without having to scroll the window first. The ads would still be there (and possibly more attractive to boot), and everybody would be happy again .
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31-07-2002 21:46
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