[Closed] Rogue adverts

Had that survey on Saturday...

I've said it before on the website update thread, but I'm pretty sure we are just numbers to get adverts served to raise more money for the site. The traffic to this is so great that ad serving is likely to be making a reasonable amount of money (for ad serving)...given the nature of these redirects and the lack of speed to rectify them, it suggests that there isn't really a desire to fix them and that the impact to the users isn't really that much of an issue.

Which is a shame as it does, once again, remind the community of users on here that this is just a business for them in charge (which kind of defeats the intention of it when it first started - yes, bills need paid as do wages, but selling out to cover those isn't great).

Dick - I believe from previous discussions about this you are right - the ads on the forum are the only part of singletrack that makes any money so we have to remember this - we provide the content for the ad based revenue that supports the whole operation. The magazine does not make enough to fund the people writing it

this is why we get so many ads in comparison to other forums - this one has to make money

From grit.cx

On ST there has been a 15% increase in traffic month on month since we activated the mobile theme with pretty much all of that coming from mobile users.

How much of that would be folk having to click on multiple links to get to the last post in a thread I wonder?

Change of strategy at STW Towers needed I think.

Can't think of any other 'big name' sites that suffer from this, it's normally low rent, click bait, ad revenue generating sites.

Perhaps put the reputation of the site, users, and the concerns of legitimate cycling advertisers above maximising ad revenue, and use a more reputable provider that vets the ads that are served.

FWIW, I have no problem with adverts. I do, however, have a problem with massively intrusive/page takeover adverts, with massive data drain adverts, with autoplay sound/video adverts and most of all, with wholly inappropriate/offensive adverts. If I can't say **** (assume that f e c k has been edited), how the **** are porn adverts allowed?

Cyclingnews, Bikerumor and others, lots of content, lots of adverts, never any of these problems.

How much of that would be folk having to click on multiple links to get to the last post in a thread I wonder?

I posed the same question a while ago. Very clever. Using the site on a mobile requires many, many clicks to get to something you [i]might [/i]want to read. Clever.

literally just had an ad for plusnet user something or other pop up on this very thread, what a load of balls

CFH - are those sites just covering costs tho or supporting a wider staff that run the magazine?

I think thats the issue here needing to maximise the advertising income

There is something that must not be named you can do to stop ads ( IIRC the ban on saying this was eased - I hope so)

Cyclingnews have a pretty big staff covering events globally, including live text coverage for example. Can't be cheap to run.

But this isn't ads, it's redirects - automatically taking the user from www.singletrack to www.pornsite

I am not against porn but I really don't expect to come to this site and have it take me somewhere else without my permission.

maximise the advertising income

That's just fine, but....

Can't think of any other 'big name' sites that suffer from this, it's normally low rent, click bait, ad revenue generating sites.

And...

I really don't expect to come to this site and have it take me somewhere else without my permission.

Spend some time on Pinkbike, NSMB, VitalMTB, Factory Jackson or others. Lots of content, none of the problem adverts.

By all means maximise advertising revenue, but just not with utter, utter shit in the way of advertising.

awww, man - was that survey [b]not[/b] someone's kid doing a uni project ?

Wish I'd not done it now, or given my email in case they wanted further critique of their grammar

Legitimate ads are OK. I've even clicked on and bought from them but I don't need them rimmed down throat. Unlike the young lady in the latest redirect, she apparently loves getting things rimmed down her throat.

Just had more porno redirects. Guys, please try and get it sorted, this just isn't on.

I'm beginning to feel a little left out here as I have had none of these things

We've reported it. The people who can fix it are probably in bed.

There seems to be some sentiment here that it's intentional. I can assure you it's not. AIUI ads get delivered via third party advertising networks, they're supposed to deliver ads according to criteria STW has agreed to but it'd seem that occasionally rogue ones break through. I don't know quite how this works, but there is no way that browser redirects, porn pop-ups and malware would be sanctioned; something has gone very wrong somewhere. (If I were a betting man I'd hazard that they're all from the same source.)

There seems to be some sentiment here that it's intentional

Might not be intentional, but the fact this has been known for a day and is still happening is pretty crap really.

I've got my adblocker on to stop them.

I'm not in bed. I've been working on it for the last few hours. Tom, was looking at it today. I've been on holiday until this evening. Let's see what happens for the next hour.

Can't sleep.

First thread:

[IMG] [/IMG]

Mind boggles.

I reported first rogue ad last Sunday, and the first redirect on Monday. A week later, it's still going on.

Forum index this time, didn't even get to click a thread.

[IMG] [/IMG]

tommathy - Key Master
… if I could get some more information on the issue such as where and when it happens plus a screenshot if possible.

Screenshots emailed to tech@

I have been getting this for over a week now. Will grab some screen shots next time.

The last one I got all but took over the phone, multiple popups and redirects, and the phone vibrating away like mad, turned into a race as I couldn't back out of the popups fast enough to be able to close the browser tab. 18 popups showing in the history.

[img] [/img]

[img] [/img]

Got another just now...went to cloudatt, then redirected to goboobs then redirected to instapic with an offer to see naked pics.

No screengrabs I'm afraid...unlike real sex, this happened too quickly.

I normally stay out of these threads but there's some worrying stuff happening.

I think Mark etc should maybe try and explain why

a) they think it's happening - surely the co's they use to deliver ads shoudl filter this stuff out?

b) why stw seems to prone to it -no other sites I go on seem to have reports as regularly as this and they're equally as busy).

c) what they're doing to mitigate - dropping some ad servers until they can trust them etc?

The answer to this problem is not '£1.50 and it goes away' - the issue is as much one of stw being a trusted brand this type of thing is damaging to stw as a brand, regardless of who's affected.

Maybe STW doesn't care about forum members as they're a bunch of whiney bawbags?

I think you're wrong on the former Jamie and the latter is a sweeping generalisation

My guess is they don't think they can identify who is serving the problem ads and they can't afford to switch off all ads and then selective re-enable them to find out who it is.

Has anyone thought about Tweeting some of this stuff? I thought that was the generally accepted way to get attention with CS issues these days.

Well you could if you like but I was up until 1 last night and Tom was working on it most of yesterday so it's not going to get more attention here. Right now I'm just pulling up at work. I have a theory as why it's happening and I'll fill you in shortly on what we've been doing and are about to do.

* 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://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2940/33443927351_4331337f45_b.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2940/33443927351_4331337f45_b.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/SXjSr6 ]Untitled1[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/7614571@N05/ ]thisisnotaspoon[/url], on Flickr

[url= https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2929/32758532203_c947426fb3_b.jp g" target="_blank">https://c1.staticflickr.com/3/2929/32758532203_c947426fb3_b.jp g"/> [/img][/url][url= https://flic.kr/p/RUL3kn ]Untitled[/url] by [url= https://www.flickr.com/photos/7614571@N05/ ]thisisnotaspoon[/url], on Flickr

Has the site been compromised?

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

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.

[img] [/img]

Please keep reporting issues and I'll keep hunting.

Bangaholic splash page

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!!