Bad advertising!

Here is a thread for you to post pictures or links to particularly bad advertising.

I was browsing with 'google' today and came across this article. I was a little distracted by the google add that the article was 'hugging'.

http://www.dadi.org/drlvalus.htm

Hopefully the ad won't rotate... I saved a screen shot just in case.

The Google ads will change, but will be based on the content and words of the page content.

The page you've linked deals with a topic, or at least portions of the topic, that would be best handled in the Underground as a discussion item.

We can give it a chance, and see if the ads remain the topic, or if the article becomes the topic. We may need to close it eventually.

The ad returns if you click refresh a few times.

Here's a link to the screenshot, it's a little racy:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v516/green-light/bad-advertising.jpg

The advent of pop up 3rd party ads makes it inevitable that there will be mismatches based on mis-understood context. It's not unrealisic for an article / web page about Paint strippers to be matched with ads for Paid strippers.

Daniel

If you have kids... ahmmm

FireFox + No Script + Adblock Plus + Easy Lists (1-3 lists, your choice).

FireFox==base browswer
No Script==stops java, java scripts, pop-ups/unders, stops cross-site script attacks, blocks flash, etc. (if you wish)
Adblock Plus==You can block any particular ad/ad company (your own filter)
Easy Lists==And/or you can add filters maintained by others...

You can turn on/off any filtering/protection you wish on a per page or per site basis...

If you use IE, there is a new add-on called IE Pro 7... Many new features to protect/help IE users (looks interesting, I have not used it myself)...

-Bill

I have a different configuration.
I have flashblock to stop the resource-sucking flash ads, adblock + filterset.g to block everything else, and noscript for added safety.

That page is completely ad-free for me.

By the way Adblock + Filterset G has been obsolete for awhile... Adblock Plus and "Easy List" (and others) is the follow up (I too migrated from AdB&G to AdB+EL)...

-Bill

Fallingwater said:

That page is completely ad-free for me.

Click to expand...

Ditto - FF and its associated add-ons :rock:

Oh, and BTW, that article is a pretty good read.

Thanks for the great replies. I was hesitant to post this thread because of its non flashlight nature, but I learned how to block those stupid ads. Great! I'm going to start using firefox more now to avoid that stuff.

that's funny!!!

BB said:

By the way Adblock + Filterset G has been obsolete for awhile... Adblock Plus and "Easy List" (and others) is the follow up (I too migrated from AdB&G to AdB+EL)...

-Bill

Click to expand...

Why obsolete?
Filterset.G still updates and works fine. What's to be gained by switching to Plus and easy list?

You can read about Adblock Plus and the old Adblock extensions here... But the highlights:

How is Adblock Plus related to Adblock? The development of Adblock pretty much stopped in 2004. When more and more people demanded improvements Michael McDonald came up with Adblock Plus 0.5 — basically a version of Adblock with whitelisting, filter subscriptions and several other useful features.


This version of Adblock Plus was still based on Adblock, which set hard limits to improvements. Quality of Adblock being… shall we say… less than adequate a complete rewrite was desperately needed. That came with Adblock Plus 0.6 — a completely new extension with focus on being easy to use, stable and secure. For various reasons many enhancements from Adblock Plus 0.5 didn't make it into the original release of Adblock Plus 0.6 but this changed with Adblock Plus 0.6.1.


Michael McDonald, the developer of Adblock Plus 0.5, has changed to the Adblock project and is trying to develop it further now. For that reason starting with Adblock Plus 0.6 the main developer of Adblock Plus is me (Wladimir Palant).
Need to know all the gory details? Check out History of Adblock.


Do I need to install Filterset.G Updater?
No. Actually, it is recommended not to use Filterset.G with Adblock Plus. There are several reasons for this:

• Filterset.G has been intentionally made incompatible with the built-in subscriptions feature in Adblock Plus, updating Filterset.G requires a separate extension which basically duplicates existing functionality.
• Filterset.G is not optimized for use with Adblock Plus, it will slow down your browsing considerably more than any other filter list.
• Filterset.G makes heavy use of very complicated regular expressions with the consequence that finding the source of problems is difficult and fixing those problems is even more so. In fact, Filterset.G is fixing most problems with exception rules which creates a problem on its own (see next point).
• Filterset.G contains a considerable number of exception rules. This is a big problem because exception rules cannot be overridden. It happened on several occasions that exception rules from Filterset.G whitelisted actual ads making these ads unblockable — something users usually blamed Adblock Plus for.

While Filterset.G has had its uses in the past, nowadays other filter lists are certainly a better choice. If you already have Filterset.G Updater installed, you can uninstall the extension and remove the Filterset.G subscription in the Adblock Plus Preferences dialog. Feel free to choose any subscription from the list then.

Click to expand...

You can try the new Adblock Plus with one or more filters (I use the 3 from EasyList, plus one other)... There should be no problem if you wish to go back to the original Adblock + Filterset.G...

However, I will give you one possible problem that I have seen... I have been using FireFox since 0.9.xxx and after installing updates and trying various extensions (adding and deleting)--for some reason my .profile file became slightly corrupted.

The symptom for me was Adbock Plus was leaving ad white space behind on my old computer, but the same setup on a new computer did not... I had to create a new profile and move a few files over (password, bookmarks, and such) to my new profile and everything worked fine again on the old PC.

Here is a link describing the profile directory provided by somebody from the Adblock Plus forum that helped me to quickly setup the replacement profile.

One funny story about Adblocking--The guy that writes the EasyList filters had a filter release that was on the same date as a major FireFox upgrade... Google's AdSense forum was swamped with complaints that they could not get to their AdSense accounts because of a new FireFox bug...

It was narrowed down to an adblocking filter that broke the Adsense login--Just to show that even the people using Google Adsense to generate revenue cruse the web with adblocking software and filters...

-Bill

PS: I should add that I am not involved with any software development (FireFox, Adblock, etc.)... Just things I have stumbled across over the years... -BB