flashing banner on front page.

"winner winner winner you have won a free plasma tv!"

does any one else find it HIGHLY irritating?

Personally it's an unacceptable type  of advertising for this site. Don't accidently click on it - it won't go away unless you dump and then reboot IE or Mozilla or whatever

Misleading and unnacceptable advertising... it's amazing the amount of fraudulent, and misleading advertising on the internet (that people and companies get away with it seemingly so easily),  I don't know the internet legality of such banner ads, if not  a criminal offence, it's very offensive at the least.  It should be criminal, and if enforcable by the net police, such stuff would be dealt with better.

Normally I use Firefox's adblock, or anothert more aggressive adblocker, but then it blocks out features iIwant on sites (like the streaming music here).

if members donated more money to help support prog archive there wouldn't be any need for advertising banners, pop-ups or whatever...!!!

We rented a new server this week (among other cms systems it hosts www.ratingfreak.com), and for €59/month we get 2TB traffic for free.

That's 2,000,000,000 kbytes! Supposing that one page of the archives is 50kb (including images), that would be 40,000,000 pages per month, or 1,333,333 pages each day. Even if there were 40,000 visitors each day, the bandwidth would do for 33 clicks per user.

Of course that calculation doesn't include the mp3 streaming ... so I say: remove it! I would be all for that, if it meant that the ads would vanish too!