* Likes *

Turn off all adz and wait for the ozone layer to fix itself before turning them back on ??

Switch to a different ad provider? Clearly they’re not all doing this, this isn’t the first time this has happened is it. Do they have a particularly high ecpm or something?

I got caught out by this this morning, while sitting in an NHS waiting room with my daughter. Not cool.

.. take me somewhere else without my permission..

That’s why safe words were invented

Wife looked over at just the wrong moment, had a lot of explaining to do. Glad this thread exists!

Good point – can we keep this thread going indefinitely?

Her: WHY T.F. ARE YOU LOOKING AT THAT????

Me: I’m not honey, I was just arguing about racist language on singletrack and it “redirected” me.

Her: ?

Me: No, really, it’s a thing – look there’s thread about it….

^ doesn’t explain why you were abusing yourself at the same time though!

Wish I had this excuse the time my wife *DID* find porn on the iPad

🙁

Please keep reporting issues direct and/or on this thread.

Still redirected to cloudatt just now.

Is it worth reporting non-occurrences? If it’s relevant and / or helpful, I’ve not had a single one of these redirects.. viewing on Chrome on a windows remote desktop.

It’s affecting Android mobile I think.

Been fairly quiet today but just had another multi popup event, phone buzzer going off and difficult to exit browser as there are so many.

My (ie, the OP) event was using Chrome on an iPhone 6

Still doing it………..

Didn’t even click on a link, it does it when I walk away from my PC. And it does it across all open STW tabs, are you sure it’s ad’s not the site as a whole?

[url=https://flic.kr/p/SXjSr6]Untitled1[/url] by thisisnotaspoon, on Flickr

[url=https://flic.kr/p/RUL3kn]Untitled[/url] by thisisnotaspoon, on Flickr

Has the site been compromised?

Didn’t even click on a link, it does it when I walk away from my PC

Yes that was the same for me – I didn’t click on an ad (at least not that I was aware of). I had been looking at the screen, looked away for a few seconds then when I picked it back up it had redirected to the Bangaholic splash page.

Has the site been compromised?

All your data are belong to us.

I got an unsolicited invitation for adult entertainment through this site today. She looked nice, but thought it best to get rid of her and run Malwarebytes et al.

It’s definitely ads. Desktop is a first. They are being slippery bastards.

OK. Here’s a bit of insight. The ad networks are notorious access points for ads with malicious code in them that spawn pop ups and redirects. They are generally not targeted (as that costs money) so they are a scatter gun approach. They are being paid for by someone – that’s how the advertising works. But the perpetrators are not prepared to spend a lot of cash on them as a campaign and so they tend to hit websites that run ads with a very low yield (or CPM – cost per thousand). In short, when the network market is cheap and cpm rates a very low, they tend to take that as an opportunity as they can spread the ads further for less money ie. they can buy the maximum number of impressions across the networks for very little money. Right now the market rate for remnant, non targeted or filler type ads is very low, especially on mobile. One reason for the downturn in rates is that a lot of major brands are pulling out of advertising with Google right now until google better matches ads to content (You may have seen in the news that the BBC and M&S have recently pulled all their ads from the Google exchanges). The result is a big crash in CPM rates in the networks. The unscrupulous advertisers with their popups and redirects are taking advantage of this and buying up a lot of very cheap inventory.

We use 4 networks (There are thousands) that we have learnt to trust. One of them has been compromised and I have removed them from our ad configuration on mobile. They are looking into tracking the source down and fixing it. Until; I’m sure they have they won’t be supplying any ads to our mobile site. Judging by the reports above they may still be coming through one or more of the other networks too.

We have two types of networks running on our site. There’s the type that allows us to set a floor price for ads. One way I check they aren’t the source is by raising the floor price to a silly high figure that effectively excludes the bad ads as they can’t afford the price anymore.

Then there’s the 100% fill networks that take every ad our system offers them but the market controls the cpm rate. We use two of these types of network. One I’ve deactivated and the other is Google Adsense, who are generally very secure.

With the screenshots above that show the redirect now on a desktop browser I’m going to start the process of elimination again as I did with mobile but on the desktop ad placements.

And I haven’t turned off the ads for two reasons. One is the obvious one – we need them on to pay the bills the other is because if I turn them off I won’t know if I’ve fixed the issue or not.

And one last bit of information for those of you interested. This links to an illustration of how complex the programmatic ad network system is. Of all the names and companies on this diagram we use 5 of them in our setup.

Please keep reporting issues and I’ll keep hunting.

Bangaholic splash page

fnaar fnaar

Amusingly, STW is now top of the results page for ‘Bangoholic’.
Good luck guys, nasty little bug to track down.

All that explanation doesn’t really explain why it’s only this site I have problems with. I’m giving up using the site on my mobile now as it’s just problem after problem and very unintuitive to use (multi-clicks etc). Only accessing here from my PC and with the naughty add-on. And yes I could go for a P but why would I pay money to a place that runs it’s site so badly? You’re very open in saying that the ad revenue from us lot using this forum helps keep your coffers full to support the mag but then the site is old, crawling with problems and has the whiff of gasping it’s last breath. The world of online advertising is about to go through a massive shift change where quality is far superior to quantity, this place in it’s free form is absolutely going in the wrong direction. I’m not slagging you off purely because you have issues but if you don’t have the facts about how I/we feel then you cannot deal with the problem.

All I’ll add is that it’s very embarrassing to have the pron pop-up happen in Specsavers, complete with near-the-end sound at full volume!!

Mark – despite all the piss-taking, you truly have my sympathies. As the recent BBC/CH4/Google thing shows, the connections and inter-dependencies are getting too much for even the largest corporations to deal with.

I don’t visit that many other sites, so I’m not aware as to whether or not they’ve been similarly compromised (and, TBH as a subscriber to this one I’m not seeing the problems either) but feedback in this thread and others suggests otherwise. That must surely raise some questions too.

Anyway, good luck getting it sorted.

It isn’t only this site. It really isn’t.

Ah well, like I say, you have my (almost) undivided attention so I’m only going on what’s been said here #fakenews 🙂

They are generally not targeted (as that costs money)

I don’t fully understand how this works of course, but would that imply that people who have the “don’t track me” type privacy settings configured are more likely to see the cheap adverts and therefore more likely to be affected by the rogue ones? Is that perhaps why some folk said they hadn’t had an issue?

(You may have seen in the news that the BBC and M&S have recently pulled all their ads from the Google exchanges)

The Guardian has as well (I didn’t know about the other two)

All that explanation doesn’t really explain why it’s only this site I have problems with.

Presumably because as Mark’s said there are “thousands” of advertising networks and the current issue is being caused by one of them.

I assume also that the more reliant a site is on advertising as a source of revenue, the more adverts you’re likely to be served to make ends meet. Conversely, the more users there are paying for content, the less necessary it would be to have lots of adverts.

Mark – despite all the piss-taking, you truly have my sympathies.

Good to see you getting back to being a team player. All that whining wasn’t helping anyone.

Gotta keep in with Mark for when we all get our free Santa Cruz Stigmatas at the Secret Policemans Mods Ball.

All that explanation doesn’t really explain why it’s only this site I have problems with.

I don’t have issues with this one but others I’ve visited, some recent, I have had. No I can’t recall recall them off the top of my head but I think one was a local paper.

It isn’t only this site. It really isn’t.

Sorry, but its the only place I get it.

And i have had none although i often have ads for single Asians but they are just embedded

the only place I get it.

Same here. Isolated to STW.

Only place you get the ad or only place you get some action?

Been all good here for some time . So if nothing else the frequency of redirects has lowered.

Even the sodding holiday Inn redirect has fecked off.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/22/resurgent_ramnit_malware/

Hmmm, is this anything to do with it I wonder?

-chill guys, wait to hear if it is before ya panic-

New one this morning.

getting re directs away from here, thankfully to a 404 but i believe its because its through fortinet and its blocked at work.

scary stuff. Can email screenshots if required. Will stop giving my phone to my daughter now just incase….

Just had a barrage of redirects that eventually crashed chrome. On a Samsung galaxy phone.

Running Firefox on Windows 10, just got a redirect to this as I loaded the forum page (cookies had expired so was not logged in).

Same here – STW on mobile is a bit of a ‘shall I shan’t I’ nowadays. The embedded ads want to send me places, open apps etc. I swear sometimes I press ‘Cancel’ and it does it anyway! I know STW needs to make money, but these kinds of redirect apps are a bit of a step too far I think – need to have a word with your ad server. Please can we have the desktop back on mobile? I actually prefer that anyway. We’ve all got big screens nowadays you know…

Oh and yes STW is the only place this happens unless I foolishly open some click bait news story, which thankfully I do way, way less than STW mobile.