Please Help! - A Note About The Ads

[Scott Greczkowski]

If you notice I always make a request like this at this time of the year as its our big expensive time of the year, not only bandwidth but colocation fees and licenses for cpanel, vbulletin, chat server etc... It stinks because they all come up at once.

Thank you to the folks who have done their part to help out where they can.

 

[Bob2011]

Thank you for killing the audio ads! No more Lady Gaga videos and celebrity news videos. I can deal with the video ads in the Arcade section but they were a nightmare in the forums.

As far as collecting more income you could do something like Fatwallet.com where you benefit from purchases members make through links to other stores. Instead of giving part of the cash back to us you could add days of ad free membership to an account.

 

[KimmiKat]

Plus when Scott nukes the annoying ads, it won't drive away potential new members and "read-bys" -- those who need a quick answer but don't sign up or log in.

Note that Scott specifically asked to let him know about certain ads. If you consider that "complaining", then so be it, but I would not have made any postings about the ads without the request from Scott.

 

[jayn_j]

You miss the point. I was objecting to the folks who were talking loudly about using ad blockers to get out of seeing the ads entirely.

You must admit that Scott goes well above and beyond reasonable in hunting down and eliminating anything objectionable. I think it is great how you do the site a great public service by pointing out objectionable ads, but you kind of forget that any other site owner simply wouldn't care or respond at all.

BTW, IMHO Scott is also using great restraint in responding to this thread. You might consider at least thanking him as he is removing those nasty ones. I've seen precious little of that here.

 

[TG2]

About screening ads, a volunteer forces could probably be put together, but keeping the group active is another things as I've seen moderators come and go on various mboards, although I noticed some mods have been here since when Howdy Dowdy was on the air!

The other problem, is that the ads must come from this site, not an HREF to some other site. As soon as you get content from some "other" site, not only do you have a problem reaching that site's webmaster to have them nix any malicious content, but the simple fact that now you have to further rely on that site's security to keep you safe, not just "this" site.

I know that may sound like paranoia ... but there have been some very serious and well known attacks ... and even if not so well known a simple uncle google search provides the backbone.
Dec 2010 - Malware found in Ads served by Google's DoubleClick.net
Malware Found In Ads Served By DoubleClick #SEWatch

Feb 2011 - UK sites - Autotrader uk, possibly ebay uk
Malware Ads Served Up By Third Party Network Infect Top UK Sites - MarketingVOX

And anyone else, before saying "i don't go to ebay uk" ... that doesn't mean a cracker didn't post a malicious ad on the US ebay site, linking you to the uk site, and into their grabby-hands malware ads.

That's also my favorite taunt for anyone using Chrome .. no Status Bar so you can't even tell the link you're hovering over is to tripleX-killer-malware dot com ...

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Ok after going through all the ads one by one yesterday for over 4 hours I believe I got all the bad ones out.

PLEASE if you see a bad one (Blinking, Automatic Audio, Flashing, Popup, Pop behind) PLEASE let me know about it so I can get rid of it. Remember many of the ads we run here are based on your location and or browsing history. So while you may see an annoying one others might not see it because they are not in the same area or have the same browsing history. So again if you see one of these ads please PM me with as much detail as possible so I can get rid of the annoying ads.

Some good news, overnight we got our hosting / bandwidth bill and it was lower then my estimates of being over $8,000. It came in at $6,700. A lot of money but better then $8,000.

Thank you for your support guys.

 

[jayn_j]

Some good news, overnight we got our hosting / bandwidth bill and it was lower then my estimates of being over $8,000. It came in at $6,700. A lot of money but better then $8,000.

Thank you for your support guys.

That's great news, Scott. $1300 you don't have to fundraise. We are currently in phase 2 of our March fundraising drive on our local NPR station because the first one didn't raise enough. Very glad we don't do that here. Can you imagine: every fourth click goes to a commercial to fund the site instead of the page you wanted.

 

[KimmiKat]

"And now a word from the Admin: Pay us today and make this commercial go away." Hopefully the new 3-month option helps get more change in.

The PBS style fund raising would drive peeps off.

That's great news, Scott. $1300 you don't have to fundraise. We are currently in phase 2 of our March fundraising drive on our local NPR station because the first one didn't raise enough. Very glad we don't do that here. Can you imagine: every fourth click goes to a commercial to fund the site instead of the page you wanted.

 

[freezy]

Here you go. I got it this time

What's the deal with every 12 seconds there is a burst uploads off my computer .

one goes to so2md...net another quantiserve, publish.dvlabs

did I just never notice this before?

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

After going through almost a thousand ads to view them all I found found that F*!@ING Survey ad!

It was labeled as an ad for BMW! BMW X3 Custom MS FebMar2011 B

We have lots of ads running for BMW which are BMW but this dang survey was labels as BMW but was not. I have alerted the ad agency so they can rename this ad accordingly. The ad system should be updated in about an hour and hopefully you NEVER see that damn ad again.

Everything else you saw was normal. BTW Quantcast is an independent stats company that keeps track on how we are doing. You can see our stats at satelliteguys.us - Quantcast Audience Profile

Now some possible good news for registered members today I am going to go through and look to see if I can REMOVE some ads from Registered members pages.

As I look now we have the following amount of people online.

There are currently 869 users online. 143 members and 726 guests

Notice that MOST of them are guests If I can move one ad that registered members are seeing and add it to the amount of ads that Guests are seeing that may help things out. If an unregistered member wants to see less ads then they can register (which is what I REALLY want anyways I want them to register and them become an active member where they can not only get help but also help others out, as that what the site is all about.

Wish me luck on this.

Thanks guys for the feedback.. and again if you see an annoying ad PLEASE PM me with as many details as possible so I can get rid of it. The entire reason for the ads is to pay the bills not drive members away.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Just got this from Adsense...

As you might remember last month we were down as we did a number of upgrades to make the site faster for everyone. Besides server improvements, new web serving software and faster CPU's in the server we also placed all ads except for Google ads in iframes to speed up the loading of all pages. (Google ads can't be place in iframes)

Just got this email from Google about the speeds of their ads, and it sounds like Good News to me.

At Google, we spend a lot of time working to make the web faster. Your site is no exception. And today, as part of this vision,
we’re pleased to announce a major boost in speed for AdSense publishers worldwide.

AdSense ads, like any element on a webpage, usually contribute to the time the page takes to load. Last year, we ran tests that showed AdSense
adding 12% on average to the time it took to load various pages from top web sites, so we set out to make this better. We’ve now developed a new ads delivery technique to
improve the speed of websites that display AdSense ads, so that it doesn’t slow down your page content. We’re very happy to announce that we’ve eliminated this slowdown for the majority of websites and for a number of browsers, and are seeing pages load as much as a second faster than before.

The best part is, you don’t need to make any changes to your code or account — the faster load time has kicked into gear for everyone automatically, so your visitors will experience a noticeable improvement in the
speed of your webpages!

At this time, we're deploying globally for users of Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and will be expanding the list of browsers that benefit from this speed-up soon.

And it doesn’t stop here, as we’ll keep working to make things even faster. Continue to grow your site and AdSense inventory. We’ll be sure to keep up.

 

[harshness]

Not a fan of this recent ad that follows me around covering up the screen telling me to take a survey. Another not so bad ad was residing just under the header telling me i had a personal message

This is a periodic survey from safecount. It is not an ad (at least not as I understand it).

I agree that it is annoying as you can't close it until it finishes its roll-in.

It is difficult to get a screen shot of as it disappears a few seconds after it stops moving.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yup as I said in the message above I found it (it was listed as an ad from BMW) and turned it off. Once the ad server update (which should be around now) it should be gone and hopefully never to return.

 

[n0qcu]

and hopefully never to return.

Until they RENAME it. (or whatever they do)

 

[KimmiKat]

If you look at my post (#30) I was able to screenie the sucker before it imploded. As per the Google ads thingy, I have noticed some sites using those a little speedied up.

This is a periodic survey from safecount. It is not an ad (at least not as I understand it).

I agree that it is annoying as you can't close it until it finishes its roll-in.

It is difficult to get a screen shot of as it disappears a few seconds after it stops moving.

 

[thomasjk]

Scott this ad is back again