Wacky Banner Ads

[guapoharry]

I'm on Satellite Guys today and got a funky banner ad. It was from a company selling "Close Combat Training".

WARNING: Do Not Watch This Free Presentation if You Have Moral,
Ethical Or Religious Reasons Forcing You To Cower Helplessly
While Someone Attacks You, Your Wife Or Your Kids...

Being a non-paid-supporter for the site and the Newington Little League, I felt compelled to click on the ad to support this website I enjoy.

The web site was sort of interesting and amusing. They described a situation called "Condition Black". Your heart rate goes up to 175. You are so threatened that your fight or flight response kicks in and you act on impulse.

Reminds me of some people's reactions to reading stuff they don't agree with. And then, they attack/flame you!

Also, the other day I was looking at sunglasses on a web site. Then hours later, I saw a banner ad on Satellite Guys from this company advertizing, you guessed it, sunglasses!

 

[crackt]

im sure the adverts based on your browsing patterns are from google ads. the banners always follow the sites ive surfed to. kinda makes you wonder what else these companies monitor about us.

crackt out,.

 

[guapoharry]

Sometimes it's kind of close.

Othertimes, I get AM/FM receiver recommendations because I was looking at satellite receivers. Or I get circuit breakers and shoes because I looked at Ku dish motors. That's on eBay.

On Amazon.com, it's a little closer than that.

Computers aren't that smart...

 

[turbosat]

not just the ads

It's the headlines that get me looking, haha, such as "Dishnetwork Sues the European Union" .

 

[Dishman Dan]

im sure the adverts based on your browsing patterns are from google ads. the banners always follow the sites ive surfed to. kinda makes you wonder what else these companies monitor about us.

crackt out,.

I got some ad with a chick laying down in a bikini top!

I spend my online time here and on fleabay! But my daughter does go on boobtube!!!

 

[Phottoman]

Hmmm, interesting. I wouldn't mind if there were adds from places I visit. I am VERY interested in Old Time Radio and Golden Age of Radio, but I don't see any adds for those here. I'm not all that convinced that the adds generated have anything to do with our surfing habits. But that may be just my thinking.

Photto

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

They for the most are indeed shown based on you surfing habits, words on the page your viewing, or whatever inventory they have for a site like ours.

Other then the gold sponsors we do not choose any of the ads that are displayed.

Honestly if I could I would have no ads here, but that all the bandwidth we use requires us to have ads to pay the bills.

 

[Anole]

. . . all the bandwidth we use requires us to have ads to pay the bills.

Has anyone looked into reducing the bandwidth used?

I have my own forum, and noticed a few users hogging bandwidth, by downloading and archiving entire sections to browse off-line.
They showed up in the logs.

Likewise, vBulletin shoves a massive amount of filler and duplicate data to the users with each page-load.
I've analyzed it's output a few times, and wondered if maybe it is just set to an excessively high-bandwidth mode?
It is my favorite forum software, but I think the authors never saw a feature they didn't incorporate.

On another vBulletin forum I only moderate and act as the trash-man.
We get quite a lot of spam.
With the much larger volume of posts SatGuy's gets, I imagine the spam-traffic here is massive!
How that is dealt with is a touchy subject, but an aggressive policy might reduce traffic somewhat.

While none of these ideas is going to cut bandwidth in half, even a 5 or 10% reduction could help.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

We have made some changes to our bandwidth usage such as moving all images to cloud based servers. This has reduced the bandwidth down some.

However to move to the cloud was also to speed up loading of pages here since the images are loaded from a cloud server near you.

The cloud has worked good for images but not so good with the vbulletin javascripts due to issues with our cludsevers in the central party of the country. The problems were so bad that we took the javas off of the cloud so that people in those areas could access the site.

 

[Mr Tony]

On another vBulletin forum I only moderate and act as the trash-man.
We get quite a lot of spam.
With the much larger volume of posts SatGuy's gets, I imagine the spam-traffic here is massive!

actually spam is not that bad. I say maybe 4 or 5 topics per week and most folks never see it. It "sits" in an "need to be approved" bin for mods to approve it (or in our case nuke it).

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yup our staff is on top of things... Sometimes one slips by... but when that happens they don't last long.

 

[Dishman Dan]

What carries computer viruses??? Ads???

I have been online a good 10 years and I had my first taste of any type of computer virus this spring!

The computer geek that removed it says it came from this website!!!
It was the first virus to stump her and it was back in a mutated form a total of three times. My computer was reformatted but my anti-virus pops up a warning now and then about this site being unsafe!!!

 

[rv1pop]

What carries computer viruses??? Ads???

I have been online a good 10 years and I had my first taste of any type of computer virus this spring!

The computer geek that removed it says it came from this website!!!
It was the first virus to stump her and it was back in a mutated form a total of three times. My computer was reformatted but my anti-virus pops up a warning now and then about this site being unsafe!!!

I had basically the same problem. The BOEING firewall / anti-virus I was running would popup with trojan horse warnings and malware warnings about every two minutes. I was on dial up and the site was horrible. I joined the pub and that helped a lot but the final help was an ad-redirect program someone here sent me to.... Got another blast from this website yesterday. It was so intrusive the background turned RED and shut the computer down! Anti-virus software is IMPORTANT.
POP

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

To answer the question YES it is possible to get a virus from the ads...

It happened to me last week on a machine at my office by going to YAHOO.COM.

In checking things out one of the ads on YAHOO had a payload in one of the FLASH ads being displayed. The computer that got hit had anti virus software on it. By the time the software caught it it was too late and the computer already was infected by something that looked like a virus scanner.

Took some work to get rid of that one.

I was told that if I was running the latest version of Flash that it would have never happened.

Here at SatelliteGuys we get our ads from 3 networks... Burst Media, ADSDAQ and Google.

From what I have been able to track down from the clues people have given me, it appears that on the weekends ads being served by one of the networks displays ads that have been hijacked. I have been in contact with that ad network and they have admit that some of the 3rd party ads they have been re-feeding to us might have had issues and they were working to insure that it would not happen again. Since then (and it has been awhile) there has been no report of issues. (Until this thread)

If you see something like this please PM me with all the details possible, including description of the ads being shown, where the ad was on the screen, and also if possible a screenshot of the ad. This will make it much easier for me to track down the ad, and also the agency.

If you haven't already make sure your version of flash is up to day as that is how that stuff is getting in. Having an old version of Flash is like keeping your doors wide open when your not home. Trust me, I learned this the hard way myself.

 

[Dishman Dan]

To answer the question YES it is possible to get a virus from the ads...

I originally thought that the virus problem was from youboob which my daughter goes on quite often! The computer geekette showed me the exact website and time whenever a virus entered. She asked me, "What are you doing up at 2 AM at something called SatelliteGuys??? Porn???"