Fixed.
Matt emailed me a link to this message and, for the first time ever, I was able to see exactly the problem being described. Yeah, interesting coincidence that I got to witness the problem first-hand finally, when trying to read a message describing the problem.
You'd think that being the company geek, that would've given me all I needed to identify the source of the problem. It didn't.
I was suspecting the 336x280 ad all along and just patiently waited for it to load and figured once it did, I'd know who the culprit was.
Nope. When it did load, it was an ad I'd seen many times, so I knew it couldn't be a consistent problem-causer, and I had no way of determining which agency was running it.
Then I saw an email someone had sent to Matt that had a screenshot of a totally blank message, but the 336x280 ad was visible.
Much to my surprise, and of infinite benefit to me, was the status bar. We need to collectively thank whoever it was who sent Matt that message because the screenshot was so useful AND because they had their status bar display enabled. I think it's disabled by default in IE.
Hey, and they use my personal CSS. Good taste!!!
Anyway, the status bar shows "Waiting for 4.adbrite.com".
I checked read_msg and, sure enough, right before the line that displayed the message text was the code to call AdBrite to see if it's time to serve an Intermission (Matt calls them InterSexual -- a variant of Interstitial, which he hadn't heard of) ad.
I was already a bit iffy about AdBrite. I love Intermission ads. But we've had various problems with AdBrite before. And their payout percentage is downright insulting, but they're the only company I know of who serves these.
I think they're a bit of a startup. And one of the problems we've been having is getting quality advertisers who are a good demographic fit.
So AdBrite is gone. If they eventually ask me why we're not delivering their ads anymore, then I'll go ahead and tell them.
Speaking of ads whose source I can't identify, if ANYONE happens to catch a good peek at their status bar while that auto-expanding American Express ad is loading, please let me know what it says. I want to kill it, but can't find where it's coming from. It's the 728x90 that expands to 728x300 for 3 seconds when it first loads, covering things like login input fields. It's more intrusive and inconvenient than the Intermissions and I KNOW nobody's paying us enough for an ad that we'd allow it.
AI
