Geopops
 
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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, 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.
 
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)
 
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 resourcesLet'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 Loadis 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 Usagesuppose 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...
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) : 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...:

 (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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