Page 3 - The Bad Advert Thread

I've been getting those ads that scroll by as well. At first I wondered if I had some adware virus.

But, I accept Web ads because DS provides a service to me for free.

The ones I really hate are Modals that take over the screen.

Expanding banner, ad for Dell dedicated servers.

http://static.2mdn.net/2237939/hw_enterprise_expandable_728x315_userv2.swf

I blocked it before I could get a screenshot of it in action (and unblocking doesn't bring it back - keep forgetting that) but you can just go to that URL to see it.



Me too. I don't subscribe to any of those giant AdBlock blacklists because it's not fair. Some ads are fine. Maybe even necessary.
But the ones that interfere with my browsing I'll block. And even then, after a while, I'll clear out the block list.
Survival of the fittest, right?

This one keeps crashing IE8 for me. Very annoying as it's preventing me from moderating. Yes I could use another browser but why should I change my habits to suit a badly implemented advert system?

The video player starts off with an advert for the movie "Brothers". It begins auto-playing with audio which is crap because it's loud, full of explosions and tends to open twice, next to each other so you can't actually make out what they're saying since the two copies play a few seconds out of sync. In the screenshot there is a pause button but that only appears just before the browser freezes. You can't pause the Brothers advert, it shows the play button but it does nothing when you tap it.

This advert is displayed in the big blocks at the bottom of the forum.

Well after countless problems with adverts at DevShed and IE8 I decided to play around with various methods of blocking the problem ads myself. I tried out three freely available methods with varying success.

• Adblock IE - "AdblockIE is an ad blocker for Internet Explorer, inspired by Firefox's Adblock and Noscrip". This one was my first attempt. You install it via an msi file and it then appears in your "Toolbars and Extensions" panel of the "Tools->Manage Addons" popup. You can't configure it at all. It seemed to work some of the time but it still let quite alot of the ads on DS show through including the problem video player one that got me started on this quest. For me, this was a fail.
• InPrivate IE8 Filtering - The idea here is that you use IE8s built in ad blocking system along with an XML file that various people keep updating. They are porting this XML file from various other online sources and there is no centralised place to find these ported files. You also have to do a minor registry edit to force InPrivate filtering to be enabled automatically each time you open IE although this is only required the first time you start doing this process. The real show stopper for me was that it was well over zealous in that it blocked loads of non-advert related content. Sure I could go through the multi-hundred line XML file and "try" to remove the problem entries but seriously, having to do that each time I do an update. Nice idea but epic fail.
• MVPS Hosts File - This is a global solution in that you replace your Windows hosts file with theirs. They have a very in-depth description of the process on their site so I won't copy it for no reason. The process is very easy to do and so far it has worked perfectly. As with the InPrivate filtering method you still have to manually download the hosts file but because it works so well I really don't mind doing this every few months. The only thing to keep in mind is if you have any custom entries in your current hosts file then you will need to manually copy them into the new one.

The MVPS hosts file is the solution I'm currently using and so far it has allowed me to resume my moderator duties. On their site they indicate that I may see a slow down when browsing due to the number of entries IE has to chew through in the hosts file. In reality I've actually noticed that things are faster now as the adverts tended to take ages to load in some cases. I guess there may be some slowdown in non evil-advert-populated sites but that's ok, at least now I can view all the DS pages without my browser crashing randomly.

After a bit more usage I did notice that IE8 crashes on certain BBC news videos, Chrome doesn't crash but does issue a plugin crash warning and fails to load the video. I didn't check the other browsers but figured two failing was enough. I did some looking around and it seems that certain video sites (like Fox News) use naughty advert domains at the start of their videos which means when the hosts file blocks them, depending on how the video player has been constructed they may crash. I've been able to restore access to the BBC news videos by commenting out the stats.bbc.co.uk like like so:

# 127.0.0.1 stats.bbc.co.uk

Which works a treat for me. I've just jumped through a ton of videos and none of them have crashed it out. YouTube and Google Videos played fine already just in case anyone wondered. You can test out a load of different video players by going to google videos and just jumping through random movies. They use the host sites player, not googles.

Some Spanish BestBuy ad. Expanding, but it gives a little bit of a pause between hovering and expanding.

Collapsed:

Expanded

From oggi_elektra-tech.s3.amazonaws.com. Sound familiar? It is.

Thanks for reporting it, I will pass it on.

Hi,

I don't know if you are aware but I have just been attacked when visiting this site by one of the banner ads I suspect. The culprit is,

h-t-t-p://googleadsenstats.ru/useralexey/loadpdf.php

It tries to load a Javascript to launch adobe acrobat and install a trojan. Luckily I am using ESET which spotted it straight away.

It appears to be a variant of Win32/Kryptik.CPF Trojan.

NetCommunities (which Devshed uses to serve ad code) was compromised and the javascript that they push out to publishers contained an iframe with that URL. Pretty serious compromise, but it seems to have been sorted now.

I'm convinced these are tracking pixels, and I'm annoyed by that. Attached - 4 or more flash apps running in 1x1 pixels in the top left corner of the page.

All 4 flash widgets are sourced from the same amazon aws URL. I see them on every page usually, but occasionally I get up to 10 of them on my screen. I only see them because I have flashblock installed to stop those auto-expanding ads.

URL of the flash:
-Dan

I was just forwarded to a malware site trying to dl some trojan to me while I was in the javascript section - just wanted to make you aware of it.

Do you remember what thread you were reading? Just trying to get any additional info to help track down the culprit.

Thanks.

Aware of... what? Was it an ad? A link in somebody's post or signature? Don't know?

[edit] BAH

yeah, it was in the javascript forum -http://forums.devshed.com/javascript-development-115/ no thread or anything, just the main page there sort of speak, hope that helps.

Whoops, seems bad ad season started up again.

For InfusionSoft,



[edit] I haven't found a way to block it so I figured I'd just block every single ad, tracking image, iframe, and whatever on DevShed.