Bride of Clippy

Prepare to be annoyed.

Go here or here or here and move your mouse toward the upper right corner just as anyone naturally would to begin scrolling down the page. Suddenly, the page you were looking at disappears, replaced with "[Cumulus]* Real Time Weather" (as opposed to, I guess, weather with lots of flashbacks and nonlinear narrative). And there, in the center right of your screen, you will see what may be the least-welcome word to anyone surfing the Web: "buffering."

This intrusive forecast is presided over by "[Cumulus]" the cartoon-cloud mascot described by its creators as "fun and appealing." It's possible that it could be fun and appealing in some other context, but not here, when it's invading your browser unbidden and uninvited. In the abstract, the cloud is probably cuter and more appealing than Microsoft's infamously unwelcome cartoon paper clip "assistant," but Clippy's appearance was always irrelevant. It was universally despised because it was intrusive -- the software equivalent of the airline passenger who interrupts your reading to ask, "Whatcha reading?"

If Clippy had come equipped with a convenient on/off switch, or if it had only spoken when spoken to, then it might have come to be regarded as a hokey-but-whimsical, useful feature of MS Office. But as it was, Clippy's inevitable, seemingly unstoppable intrusions came to be regarded as not merely annoying, but evil. (After all, even vampires can't enter your home unless they're invited.)

The insidious feature to this weather ambush is how easy it is to trigger unintentionally. You do not have to click on it to cause it to take over your screen, all you need do is scroll your mouse over (or, seemingly, near) it and you're stuck -- buffering, buffering, buffering -- until you can locate the close button and get back to whatever it was you were trying to do.

This feature is interesting to anyone who's hosted Google Ads or a similar service on their site. Google is vigilantly concerned about click fraud, and the gods of Google are swift and unmerciful in their punishment of anyone found to be guilty of it. If you were to reconfigure the Google ads on your site so that they were triggered by [Cumulus'] rollover mechanism, rather than from the more deliberate "click," the traffic for these advertisers and thus, initially, your ad revenue, would increase dramatically due to the stream of accidental rollovers. Your newfound wealth would be short-lived, however, as Google would soon deem you guilty of click fraud, revoking your ad-hosting privileges and banishing your site from search results. Google regards this kind of accidental/ambush traffic as a form of fraud perpetrated against its advertisers.

For [Cumulus], this is a feature, not a bug. The widget's site says as much, explicitly, boasting to potential advertisers that "It's a roadblock."

Well, yes, that's exactly what it is. It's a roadblock thrown across the path of anyone visiting the site hosting it. These are, as you can see from the examples above, primarily news sites. Consider for a moment the journalistic outlook that might allow one to celebrate tossing "roadblocks" between readers and the information they are seeking.

Or consider the perspective of potential visitors to such a site. I'll let Bugmaster take it from here, with a comment lifted from an earlier post:

If you make your site annoying for your readers to visit, they'll do one of two things:

• Write a Greasemonkey script to fix it, or

• Stop visiting your site

A script costs them a miniscule fraction of what you've spent on developing your latest online-push, dynamic advertisement paradigm solution, and it almost completely negates it -- it's not as effective in this respect as not visiting your site ever again, but it's close.

So, online publications: maybe you'd like to ... I don't know ... stop wasting money on driving away your readership? Just a thought.

The frustrating thing about [Cumulus] is that it could be a useful feature -- something that readers might choose to click on if they were given the choice of clicking on it. But by making it, instead, a "roadblock" prone to accidental triggering, its creators have turned a potential asset into a liability.

* Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. In this case, me.

Comments

[Richard Hershberger]

It is a little like back in the early days of the web, when political and business leaders had a vague sense that they had to have a web presence but little idea of what to do with it. They often ended up with sites that clearly were designed on the newest, fastest computers with the newest, fastest connections. In other words, web sites that were completely unusable by much of the target audience. The clueful always made allowances for slower tech, either by creating dual sites or just leaving out the bells and whistles.

Come to think of it, there is very little I want from the web other than text and the occasional picture. Mostly my upgrades over the years have been to accommodate the useless crap site designers add, with me staying close enough to the trailing edge of technology to still be able to get my text and occasional picture.

The difference with this widget is that it seems to have been consciously designed to have all the bad qualities: if not actively evil, this at least takes cluelessness to a higher level. And yes, I would actively avoid any site that used it. There are very very few sites that have a monopoly on what I want. I will go the the sites that aren't actually going out of their way to be badly designed.

[Stan Taylor]

I'm not sure if it just doesn't work in Firefox or whether the AdBlock extension blocked it, but thankfully I had to view those sites in IE in order to experience this wonderfully useful and helpful add-on to these web sites. I can't tell you how useful it is for me to go to the site of a Tennessee newspaper in order to get my weather report for central Texas.

[Zzyzx]

Clippy DID have an off switch. It was just that it was too hard to find it. I was contracting on the Outlook 98 team so I had to use Office (and reinstall it all the time) and the first thing I always did was turn that off.

I was working with the localization team, so I got to see the Japanese office assistants. They had a cool dolphin - my biggest influence to the Office experience is that I was able to script it so the dolphin was the default helper - but the "office lady" never would have flown here.

[Scott]

If Clippy had come equipped with a convenient on/off switch, or if it had only spoken when spoken to, then it might have come to be regarded as a hokey-but-whimsical, useful feature of MS Office. But as it was, Clippy's inevitable, seemingly unstoppable intrusions came to be regarded as not merely annoying, but evil. (After all, even vampires can't enter your home unless they're invited.)

I love it, unwanted paperclip icons and weather downloads are worthy of blog condemnation because it forces something on Fred, Evangelical Journalist. 'Can't have that. Fred, web designers that use Cumulus are providing you with a website you choose to visit, and so you owe them control over your browser to do with as they see fit. It's a contract you signed when you visited their website. Quit trying to shirk your responsibilities to others. You owe them. You have a responsibility to them. If people stop going to these websites, the people who build and maintain them will be out of jobs, and you can't put their children on the street simply because of your own petty, selfish desire to control your own browser. Jesus Christ demands you go visit that sight again, and make the sacrifice of the Cumulus download for the Common Good of creating jobs for people Cumulus would hire. I said "common good", therefore I win the argument.

Surely that argument will justify something as relatively unintrusive as a weather download, wouldn't it?

[Jesurgislac]

I'm told (though I never cared enough to install it) that the cat-shaped version of Clippy was somehow less annoying than the paperclip version, because (said the person who'd switched to Cat) you expect a cat to jump up and be annoying and instrusive and omg CUTE *pet pet* purrr purrrrr

[the opoponax]

y'know, over the years, i've just become able to ingore Clippy. there have even been times i've actually used clippy, because i had been ignoring him and thus bore no grudge. i dont' know how i do it, but i do.

[David Reevely]

Also, you'd better be interested in the weather report for somewhere in the United States, since that's all Cumulus offers. If you're foolish enough to visit one of these websites from somewhere abroad, you'll get all the annoyance and not even any useful information.

Admittedly the Statesman-Journal wasn't on my daily-visits list, but I didn't realize hyperlocality extended to being actively hostile to other potential web traffic.

[Chuchundra]

I'm not seeing it on Firefox either. I suspect that Adblock is stopping it. Yay for Adblock!

[Inquisitive Raven]

I'm not seeing it, but I have Norton Security installed and it appears that either the pop-up blocker or ad blocker is getting it. Anyway, for some reason, since I installed my router, the only browser I can use is the one I had open when I did the install, Seamonkey.

[GailVortex]

whistles past the troll, eyes averted

[Spalanzani]

“Real Time Weather" (as opposed to, I guess, weather with lots of flashbacks and nonlinear narrative)”

Or perhaps Turn-Based Weather.

[forestwalker]

Firefox and AdBlock win again!

[Lusec]

Odd. Opera 9.21 won't show it at all (a good thing, as far as I am concerned), and IE7 would only show it on the Statesman-Journal. I'd expect Opera to shield me from that kind of stuff, but not IE7.

[stinger]

GailVortex: Indeed. I've been a faithful reader of this site for more than two years, and this troll routinely attacks slacktivist for statements and attitudes that, as far as I can see, he has never said or demonstrated.

And when he (slacktivist) raises so many issues that are fruitful for commenter discussion, too!

We'll keep whistling!

[Bugmaster]

Wow, I'm... I'm... famous ? *hides under the bed*

Anyway, I'm guessing that the reason why Firefox and Opera don't show that hideous spawn of Clippy is not because of their ad-blocking prowess, but because of the incompetence of people who wrote the Frankenclippy. These kind of people tend to code for IE (and, even, their specific version of IE), and ignore everything else.

[Jesurgislac]

the opoponax: y'know, over the years, i've just become able to ingore Clippy.

And the opoponax wins the Typo of the Year Award!

(Sorrry Bugmaster; You are no longer famous. All the Internet paparazzi are now chasing the opoponax.)

[Bugmaster]

Yey ! *creeps out from under the bed*

[Jeff]

Bug, I saw the BoC in Firefox, but I don't use AdBlocker. That seems to be the relevant piece, rather than the browser.

[Bugmaster]

Oh yikes, you're right. I didn't see it last time because I have a slow connection here, and it took a while to load. *removes whitelisted page from adblock* Ah, that's better.

[MikeJ]

Forget about clippy (which I also never saw), how about that hideous news10 website? Even with adblock it still looked like some sort of nascar nightmare.

Sad, sad, sad to see old media people trying to do the web. Their mindset says, "we run promos for our shows and features. Promos look like ads. Promote our shows and features on our website by making them look like ads!"

[the opoponax]

"And the opoponax wins the Typo of the Year Award!"

Typo? That was no typo.

I simply find Clippy much easier to deal with when s/he has been festooned with entrails.

Doesn't everyone else find this to be true?

[Drak Pope]

Clippy isn't as bad as that. At least Clippy appears in a corner of the screen and can be easily removed. That evil cloud being (I can only assume that this "Cumulus" is in fact Pazuzu, Dread Lord of the Evil Spirits of the Wind come to torment innocent browsers) takes over the entire screen and does everything in its power to slow up your computer and make sure that you are so infuriated that you have to hit alt-f4 while muttering The Lord's Prayer and making the sign of the Cross over and over. It's quite an inconvenience as you can well imagine and far worse than the unobtrusive little paperclip who meekly implores you to tolerate its presence for only a few moments, don't you think?

[Ryan Ferneau]

So, how do you get Cumulus to appear? I opened StatesmanJournal in Internet Explorer and waved my mouse over everything but nothing happened.

[slartibartfast]

Bugmaster, I'm not sure it is the incompetence of people who wrote the Frankenclippy, in Opera the ad specifically states that you need to click for the extended forecast, rather than rollover. Perhaps they realised their 'roadblock' wasn't going to work the same for everyone and coded browser-specific versions.

[chaos_engineer]

Surely that argument will justify something as relatively unintrusive as a weather download, wouldn't it?

Yikes, that was pretty sad. I can appreciate a good parody, but that was completely incoherent.

The "visiting a website is signing a contract" would be parodying libertarian rhetoric. (Although it's a bit of a stretch to call it "parody", since I've seen libertarians seriously making that argument.)

Then you switch to "If annoying websites go out of business, then people who design annoying websites will lose their jobs". That's the "broken windows" fallacy, which can be used to defend any world view.

Finally you switch to "Common good trumps everything", which parodies the rhetoric of any of the sensible (non-libertarian) world views.

I dunno. It's just a mess. I'm wondering if this blog is getting to be a little too much for you. Maybe you should go troll a Harry Potter blog for a while? Just until you're feeling better?

[Ryan Ferneau]

Hey, I noticed that on this site, http://www.joblo.com/cloverfield-is-overnight , when you roll over "television", it makes a video about Shark Week pop up. Now this wasn't a big deal for me, but I bet it could really mess up a slower computer. We should all fear the double underlines.