That "In case you're not aware, there's COVID-19 happening" banner isn't nearly tall nor yellow enough. Given a 6-inch-tall screen, the proper layout would be:

  +-----------------+
  |2" of vestigial  |
  |COVID messaging  |
  +-----------------+
  |1.5" of actual   |
  | content         |
  +-----------------+
  |2.5 of EU        |
  |  cookie banner  |
  +-----------------+

A local utility took it even further during COVID:

  +---------------------+
  |2" of COVID messaging|
  +---------------------+
  |1" of undismissable  |
  | "our app is gone;   |
  | use the mobile site |
  | that you're on now" |
  +---------------------+
  |0.5" of content      |
  +---------------------+
  |2.5" of EU cookie    |
  | banner, despite     |
  | being a US-only corp|
  +---------------------+

▲ jasonjayr 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It also needs to scroll in after a second or two, and shift the page content down, so you mis-click the wrong link, and end up loading something that takes forever to load and somehow manages to cause the back button to misbehave.

▲

pbhjpbhj 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Clever people with no morals use that to load ads under your finger, timed to create an inadvertent click.

I swear NYT do this in their games app, the play button gets replaced with a subscribe as the late loaded subscribe element shifts the page exactly the amount to put subscribe under your finger. I wonder how well it worked?

	▲	bartread an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Nothing clever about it: it’s a simple and unethical parlour trick. Every news website does it and, in the UK, the local news outlets are amongst the worst. The thing I don’t get: many of these sites are running Google Adsense, amongst other ad networks. Adsense Ts & Cs specifically forbid site behaviour that deliberately causes users to misclick on ads. So why aren’t these sites being banned by Adsense? The answer, I suspect, is follow the money: it seems likely that they bring in too much money for Google to ban them even though they’re overtly and outrageously breaking the rules.

▲

monknomo 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

manually scrolling before every widget loads should cause a full page refresh.

zooming in should cause a full page refresh