Surfing Around the Traffic Exchanges

In his blog today, Tim Linden has rightfully raised the issue of why surfers need to use a wonderful Firefox ad on called No Script. There is a new report that in fact has a go about No Script because it is claimed that some website owners are “missing out on making money” due to the use of No Script. Now I am not about to critique that report because the author has compromised her own position on the subject due to her association with the owner of a particular website. Instead what I am going to do here is write about why No Script is a must for users of Traffic Exchanges. Another essential is AdBlock which helps the surfer to be able to stop those heavy loading images.

There are many good reasons for surfers to continue to use No Script and to quite frankly ignore the report written by Sunny Suggs. Here are some of my reasons for using No Script when I am surfing especially at Traffic Era and a few other exchanges where one is not totally protected against malicious people who add trojans to their sites.

1. Bandwidth. There are sites out there, such as Mythology Surf that have splash pages that are huge. This kind of splash page takes up too much bandwidth. By using No Script a surfer can have a page load a lot faster instead of waiting for a heavily laden slow image to appear. Mythology surf is only an example where the splash pages are just too big.

2. Clock hunting at Traffic Era. When a team at Traffic Era is in the hunt the last thing we want is a slow loading page. I use Mythology Surf as an example here, but there are plenty of other examples out there. By using No Script it is possible to ban the page from loading, and thus the time is not being wasted. This is important in that situation.

3. Sites that have auto-load flash player video movies for example Yuwie. I hate Yuwie. I hate it because of the fact that they advertise by using a flash player with a man who has the most irritating voice. What is really worse though is the fact that you cannot turn the video off. If a surfer is not interested in this Yuwie site then that surfer should not have to sit through the flash player movie. The answer though is to disable the plugin so that the flash player cannot load. I can do this in the Maxthon browser and I can do it by using the NoScript Ad on.

4. Trojans. Yes, there are many sites out there and they are at Traffic Era and other exchanges too, that have a download trojan attached. By using No Script a surfer is better protected than someone who is not using No Script. So far I have been lucky because my own anti-virus protection has been diligent in picking up these trojans. I get several warnings every week about these trojans.

These are just a few reasons for the continuing use of No Script. I agree with Tim Linden on this matter. If a person wants people to see their site then disable these annoyances.

I am not going to respond to squeeze pages. I am not going to sign up to these lists and programs, especially where there is a cost beyond my means involved. I do not believe that there are sales being missed because surfers are using No Script. I think that the real issue is related more to the content of that particular website. If the website owner has loaded the page with a trojan then they deserve the lack of sales. Surfers need to protect their private information and it is essential that they take precautions to prevent the malicious type that are out there in cyberspace. NoScript is one of the ways for fighting back against the malicious people who want to harm us as we have fun on the Internet.

This post could be dedicated to Traffic Era. I have been a member of Traffic Era prior to the actual launch. I did not know what to expect at first, and over time I have discovered the value of being a member of that particular exchange. Yes, I am hooked on surfing at Traffic Era. I have changed teams a few times and I am happily now a member of the Lords-Of-Traffic team. This is a great team and with a good team leader. Yes indeed we do have a lot of fun, and I am not about to give away our secrets.

Team surfing came of age with Traffic Era, but the exchange was not the first to have team surfing. The oldest exchange with Team Surfing is StartXChange. I joined this exchange in February but I did not really understand the team concept at that stage. I was in a team but I did not bother to surf, but that has changed in the past few weeks. I was booted from the old team and I was happy to find that I was unteamed, and now I am a member of the All4OneWorld team. It is not the same as TrafficEra because we do not chat as we surf – not that it matters because several of us are on the same team at Traffic Era.

The newest exchange to introduce the concept of team surfing is Lords-Of-Traffic. The team surfing is in the beta phase at the moment. A chat module has been introduced so that we can chat as a team and with other members of the exchange. I think that I really like chatting to everybody. There are a lot of chances to win credits and prizes on this exchange. There is a referral summer competition, and a surfing competition.  There is a competition to collect helmets and the 5 with the most at the end of the week win prizes. There is a letter hunt competition and the prizes do vary, as well as a poker game and another card game to be found as one is surfing. It is all good fun and this exchange is quite interesting and exciting.