KillAd Frequently Asked Questions http://www.wplus.net/pp/fsc/ Q. What is so special about the program? I've seen similar programs. A. I love my users. All my competitors' programs constantly monitor all windows in system, consuming lots of precious CPU time and therefore slowing down the whole system. KillAd does NOT degrade system performance because it works in a different way. More, it does not require any huge additional libraries like Visual Basic run-time just because it is written entirely in Assembly language. Yes, this needs much more efforts than writing "programs" in Delphi or VB but once again, I LOVE AND RESPECT MY USERS. I prefer to spend my time and efforts instead of making my users upgrade their computers every single month and wasting their time and money. All this has a side effect. Have you ever heard the phrase "This is not my bug, wait for the new Delphi release, maybe they'll cure the bug"? Sounds familiar? Yeah. You won't hear this phrase from me. All bugs in KillAd (if any) are exclusively MINE, no other parties involved. And KillAd is free. Anyway, you decide. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. What is considered as a popup? A. It depends. In general, I consider a popup ANY NEW BROWSER WINDOW. Yes, the rule may be a bit too severe, so there are a couple of options telling the program what exactly it must consider a popup. First of all, you may instruct the program not to spy for maximized windows. If your browser is maximized and you open a new window manually, it gets maximized, too (at least, Netscape works this way). That is, all windows you open intentionally are maximized. On the contrary, popups are rarely maximized. That is, most of windows opening automatically are not maximized. The task is done. Second, you can give the program a list of popups. As only the program sees a window whose title matches to one of entries in the list, it realizes that this is really a popup you don't like to see and destroys it. If a window's title cannot be found in the list, the window stays alive. This method is very accurate, however you have to maintain the list of "wicked" windows. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Your URL list feature does not work. I know exactly that the line "Some words from one of our sponsors" is in my URL list but when I visit a site hosted on Geosh... oops... Geocities popups stay alive. Why? A. Computers (even ones running Windows) are a bit faster than human brain. Usually browser windows change their caption twice. At first the caption changes to the window's URL and after a while it changes to the title of current HTML document. When KillAd notices caption change most probably the caption still shows the URL and in the case of Geocities the URL is http://www.geocities.com/ad_container/blah-blah-blah. When you notice the popup its caption usually has turned into the document title and in the case of Geocities it is "Some words blah-blah-blah". Though the latter string presents in your URL list, KillAd does not destroy the popup because it saw the first one and it was not in the list. The solution is very simple - put both strings in the list. It is also possible for KillAd to miss the first caption change and notice only the second one (quite often browsers behave rather unpredictably). The solution is very simple - put both strings in the list. Summary: the solution is very simple - put both strings in the list. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. How can I know the first string? A. Guess... Don't worry, it's easy. The Add URL dialog has all tools to do the job. When you open the dialog, its edit control may be not empty. In this case it shows the title string of the last tracked window as it was seen from the point of view of KillAd. If this string differs from the current title, add it and then use Finder Tool to add the current title string. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Something is wrong with your Add URL dialog. Sometimes the edit field is empty and sometimes it shows some strange URL. Huh? A. This edit contains the title of the last tracked window as it was seen from KillAd's point of view. If no windows were tracked or if the last tracked window was successfully recognized as a popup, the edit is empty. Otherwise it isn't. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I want to add an entry into the URL list but the Add button is disabled. A. This entry (or an entry with wider scope) is already in the list. For example, you want to add the "Some words from" line and the entry "Some words" is already in the list. In this case all windows whose titles begin with the words "Some words" (including ones whose titles begin with "Some words from") are already popups and the line you're trying to add is purely superfluous. The smaller the list is the faster is its processing, therefore you better don't put superfluous entries when you edit the list manually. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. When I open new browser window it becomes background window first and after a while returns into foreground. What's wrong? A. If this behavior annoys you check the "Restore focus: Never" box in Advanced options dialog. If another method of focus controlling is chosen any window while it is being suspected to be a popup is brought into the background. When it is clear that the window is not a popup it becomes active again. When you prohibit KillAd to control the focus (Restore focus: Never) this effect disappears but please note it also disappears for real popups. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. How do I change the wave file? A. Rename the wave file you want to use to killad.wav and put it into KillAd folder. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Your [...] program plays my favorite wave file (Beethoven's 5th) not every time it kills a popup. A. The KillAd's sound subsystem is intentionally programmed not to interrupt any currently playing wave sounds. Imagine you're listening to some MPEG file. KillAd destroys a popup, stops your MPEG and plays its sound. There is no way to restart your interrupted MPEG and you'll have to restart it manually. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't love this behavior. When popup intensity is high, the program may attempt to play sound while the previous sound is still playing. In this case one or more sound events may be omitted. Note this does not affect the situation when KillAd is instructed to produce beeps and each killed popup is accompanied by a beep. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. The tray icon does not change when I fiddle with the Control key. Why? A. Most probably you are in a console application or DOS session. Due to the Windows design there are no chances for Windows application to know that a key was pressed in a console application. Or better say, I am too lazy to build the bypass. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I've released the Control key but KillAd's icon stays inactive. Why? A. If I were Micro$oft I would publish a note saying that this behavior is by design. Unfortunately, it isn't. This is a bug. The only question is whose bug it is. And I'm starting to think that it is not mine. There are cases when I'm not notified that a keyboard events has occurred and therefore the icon doesn't change. One of early betas had much more reliable keyboard events detection scheme. However, it required too much of precious CPU time and was therefore removed. Anyway, when you see that the icon has stuck in some state just press the Control key once and release it immediately. This will cure the icon. Please note the situation described here affects only the icon appearance and does not affect any of windows tracking procedures. I'm going to investigate the situation more carefully before releasing the next version. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. My browser crashes sometimes after closing a popup. A. Netscape, huh? Why do you ask me about the problem? I don't do anything illegal. Netscape guys do. You can easily prove that this is not my problem. Just open a page producing a popup and when the popup appears try to close it as fast as possible. Try this few times. If you're fast enough you'll win pretty soon. Another way to prove this is to run the browser under NuMega's Bounds Checker (please don't attempt to do this if you suffer of heart diseases). After that you'll stop wondering why it crashes sometimes (and start wondering why it does not crash every single microsecond). Smart M$ guys do not allow their browser to be run under BC, although I'm sure the whole picture is the same. As a temporary solution I can suggest to increase the Pre-kill extra delay value in Advanced options dialog. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. I sometimes receive "Script error" message. Why? A. Let me guess: Geocities and IE4. Yes? Yes. Unfortunately, the script which produces popups on Geocities is pretty wicked. Roughly speaking, it creates a popup, waits a bit, and then attempts to communicate with the popup. If the popup is closed for the moment, this attempt is unsuccessful and IE4 reports error. You can easily reproduce the situation by closing popups manually as fast as possible. You can avoid the problem by increasing the Pre-kill extra delay value to something like 2000-3000ms (the biggest delay in the Geocities script is 1700ms but implementation of this timing in IE is highly inaccurate). This way when the script wakes up and attempts to communicate with the popup, it is still alive and IE does not say anything about the problem. Btw, there is an option in IE5 which allows to disable such "error" reports. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Q. Where can I get the latest releases of KillAd? How can I mail the author? A. http://wwwwin.wplus.net/pp/fsc/ http://www.fortunecity.com/skyscraper/apple/759/ fofcheek@hotmail.com fofcheek@mail.wplus.net