How do I stop an effect in jQuery

Question

I have a page that uses

$(id).show(\"highlight\", {}, 2000);

to highlight an element when I start a ajax request, that might fail so that

Answer 1

.stop(true,true) will freeze the effect so if it's invisible at the time then it remains invisible. This could be a problem if you are using the pulsate effect.

$('#identifier').effect("pulsate", {times:5}, 1000);

To get around this I added

$('#identifier').stop(true, true).effect("pulsate", { times: 1 }, 1);