New ad issue on this site?

When the ads give you strife,
And it’s affecting your life,
That’s Safari.

There is no problem with the site, there is no problem with the site…
Keep repeating it and it will come true.

Arrghh, new blooming L’Oreal advert covers the screen and when you click on X it doesn’t close it but redirects. That’s not right. 👿

Oh, and after being logged out again, can I just ask this, which really really really REALLY pisses me off..

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WHY is the login element of the page the very last thing to load?

If that was made the first part to load, I’d guess you’d appease a lot of folk that pay for the site.

First time I’ve ever been hit with what seems like an ad related issue:

Laptop with Firefox 45.0.1 on Win7.

With Ad***** off (my default setting for STW) the site loads 224 scripts (according to the count in NoScript, and I allow them all) but since this morning I have no ability to scroll.

As far as I can tell the page has finished loading (took 5 minutes for the rotating tab icon to clear) so I don’t think there is a failed popup anywhere (in fact I have never had popups on STW).

I have now turned Ad**** on and the site is working fine.

I can’t scroll up past your post.

Same here, Chrome on Win7.

WHY is the login element of the page the very last thing to load?

Double bubble

I’m sure the site guys are working on it, but that I-phone ad redirect is doing my tits in now and making the site unusable from any of my mobile devices. I mean, at points I’ve had to stop procrastinating on STW and actually had to go and do something productive. The inhumanity of it all!

Princess flounce over

I got a load of takeaway ads this morning. So I popped over to Greggs for a bacon butty.

Sorry about the redirect. The issue is we are really struggling to replicate it. I’ve refreshed the three devices I have here hundreds of times and so have others in the office. Not that we don’t think it’s a problem but the networks need a direct link to be able to track anything down.

I’m thinking it may also be geo targetting so if it’s happening to you still, please email me direct and include..

screen grab (if possible) showing the whole screen/page
Your browser
Device
and broad location (Nearest city will be enough)

For what it’s worth the site is now scrolling again without any prophylaxis.

NoScript has reported 89 and 122 active scripts at various points during this evening…

FFS!

One window open with just one tab.

1. Logged in, posts worthless comment.

2. Admires own reflection (i.e 30 seconds without touching laptop).

3. Clicks ‘bike forum’

4. Logged out!

5. Realises nobody cares.

6. Admires own refection again.

I care

Tinder style sex ad redirect with topless women is great, is take a screenshot but I’d get banned for posting it 😆

Just had same sex redirect too plus many others.

Emailed STW. Getting beyond a joke

I went and got a ‘P’.

I regularly get issues at work using IE9 and the ads will not close but re-direct. Not knowing how all this works I thought it was the ads being sneaky to generate more hits rather than anything STW related, and thought this accounted for why Audia and Maserati believed they were getting so many hits from STW!

Using IE9, in Edinburgh and I dont have any screen grabs but last week when I was there it was the car banners at the top that were redirecting.

is there any resolution to the ad redirect thing? i get it constantly now from my mobile (i-phone 6) to the point were it’s unusable on the site – mainly congrats you’ve won an i-phone 7, but with a healthy dose of porn and sky bet thrown in for good measure – i not sure what my onoine usage is saying abot me if these are my traget ads! is there any fox from my end i can do?

Is the email addy tech@? Getting constant redirects on iOS Safari. Most times goes to King.com, but others as well. Tried to screen cap one of the initial redirects, but couldn’t get it. Hopefully what I did get helps.

Yup tech@

Cheers

Heh. Tried to come back on the thread to say thanks for the confirmation and got redirected again. At least I got a screencap of the guilty party. Will forward it on.

seems to be in fits and starts, was uncontrollable earlier today, couldn’t even access the main forum page without a redirect

First thing I’d like to say is 😯
Next thing is ‘What the blue blazes just happened!!!!!! ‘
I got a lady showing me her CAT!!! Spilt my blooming tea over my carpet 🙁
I doubt it was a pedigree cat, but I’d rather not see anyone’s cat.

I’m a good chap, don’t roam the net for pictures or videos of lady’s cats and I really
Don’t want someone else’s cat on my phone.

Not enough bleach in the world to get my screen clean 🙁

Wasn’t logged in, but by heck I am never logging out again 🙁

Definitely awake now (and traumatised 🙁 )

fwiw it is likely there is an element of geotagging as I get nothing other than regular ads when logged out. Belgium/Windows10/IE/Chrome/Edge and no ad blocking.

The site is now so slow it is completely unusable when logged out on my phone. Just fine logged in though

Am I also seeing more ‘P’s appearing all the time?

Am I also seeing more ‘P’s appearing all the time?

Are you suggesting it’s a strategy employed by STW to get more revenue ?

I’ve reported loads to tech this week, quite frankly it appears to make no difference, and I Mark has been trying his best

seeing more ‘P’s appearing all the time

They’re coming in an absolute shower.

I’ve reported loads to tech this week, quite frankly it appears to make no difference, and I Mark has been trying his best

That’s disheartening. Was going to forward some stuff over today, but it looks like they’re constantly playing catchup.

Edit…goddamit.

*shakes fist at adtrack.king.com and rewrites post*

On my phone it regularly redirects to some advert, then to the app store for a game or something – without me even clicking on anything. It’s doing it a lot now – getting to the point of being unusable on the phone.

Could be worse…some users are getting porn.

I was getting frequent pop-ups for masseratti the other day.

I generally accept the ridiculous number of banner ads on STW now are just part of paying for the site, I’m not keen on paying for the ‘P’ as I’m quite tightfisted, certainly not the sort who would consider a masseratti…

I don’t mind being advertised to, I would prefer it if they used cookies that at least target them properly, but pop-ups are a bit much and will drive traffic and potential click though revenue away… Sort it out FFS STW, you’re the only one’s who’ll be losing revenue…

I’ve deactivated one network from the MPU position (That’s the technical term for the square-ish ad at the top of the RH column) so I’ve been able to rule out them. Next I’ll be deactivating that network from all the other zones. That process will repeat for the other 2 networks through all the zones until I stop getting reports.

It’s a huge frustration that we can’t replicate it the problem on our devices as I’d be able to go straight to the problem. It’s also likely that the networks aren’t aware of it. All of them have t&cs that preclude these types of ads. It’s a rogue/hacked advertiser somewhere in the system.

We’ve also dropped a zone on the front pages of the site completely (permanently, a month ago) in order to reduce the ad load on the page. What we are trying to do is raise the value of the remaining positions to compensate for the loss.

We are trying to fix this and your reports do help. Keep them coming to me directly by email if possible as that alerts me much more quickly than forum posts. I’ll keep you updated here though when I have news.

Networks are great and evil at the same time but when bike industry marketers throw more and more of their marketing spend into producing their latest ‘sick edit’ video that they then try and get us to share to you guys as an editorial piece on the front page or on our Facebook page there’s fewer safe and simple bike brand ads to put on the site.. and so we have to use the networks to fill more of the available inventory… and crap like this happens.

It’s a crappy downward spiral that convinces me the end of display advertising as we know it is on the way. I’m sure that makes you all happy to imagine an online life with none of these ads all over the place and it does me too.. so long as the alternative revenue streams stack up and make it all economic.

I’m hoping that as more alternative revenue streams come online I’ll be able to deactivate more ad zones on the site. Our ideal alternative is subscriptions of course. More of those will make it much easier to become even more selective about the ads we allow on the site.

The Skimlinks system that we implemented in February is showing really good promise for example. It’s a bit variable in revenue generation as it relies on you lot creating links to retailers websites and that seems to come in fairly unpredictable waves, but with more time and more data it will average out to something we can plan with. I’m hoping then I’ll be able to drop at least one of these networks completely.

I’ll give you all another update when I have more to report.

Appreciated. FWIW I’ve not seen any rogues (when I am logged out, often 😀 )

pop-ups are a bit much and will drive traffic and potential click though revenue away

The data is clear.. they really don’t. There is a definite net gain for us. But they are annoying but when we use them it’s because the advertiser is paying an amount that we really can’t ignore. They could be restricting our growth of course as I imagine that we may lose some page impressions but we have increased users to the site by 6% yoy.

I’m not saying this to be clever and smug. I’m not. I dislike them as much as you. But they are a necessity when they come in at the price the Maserati campaign did and that money will help us develop alternative revenue streams that hopefully will mean we don’t need to use them in the future.

The agency behind the Maserati campaign (which ended on the 31st March) contacted me on Friday to ask if we can reactivate it as they have unsold inventory still to deliver on the global campaign. I’m not reactivating it, despite the loss of the revenue.

I’m not saying there won;t be other pop up campaigns in the future, but I wanted to explain the reasons behind them. We are a publishing company that employs 12 people and pays a lot of freelancers in addition. Profit margins in publishing have always been amazingly tight and right now as new technology is transforming the entire landscape it’s a hell of a job to maintain revenue streams while we adapt and develop in the new world of publishing.

The logging out issue is on our tech agenda btw.

I’m not saying there won;t be other poo up campaigns in the future

I accidentally visited one of those sites once. Never again.

Oooh.. in before the edit there Drac.. I thought I’d got it in time 🙂

The logging out issue is on our tech agenda btw.

If it helps you any Mark, we did what we could to narrow it down a little while back and the discussion is here:

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/why-wont-my-phone-stay-logged-in-stw

Nothing concrete but perhaps there’s a few leads there that might help as a starting point.

Oooh.. in before the edit there Drac.. I thought I’d got it in time

Unlucky.

Since changing the default browser in Safari from Google to DuckDuckGo the irritating pop-ups vanished, at least on my pad. I don’t often use the phone, but I’m using it now, and when I hit post on the air mattress thread I got hijacked and diverted to some ‘dear bt user you’ve won a prize’ site, which meant I had to hit the back button to get back to STW,
which still showed my post in the send box, so I hit send, only to find the post was there already.
I’ve nor swapped the Safari browser on the phone to DuckDuckGo, that does seem to get rid of the really irritating stuff, while leaving legit adverts in place, which I have no issues with.
It might be worth others doing the same, swapping from Google to Bing, Yahoo or DuckDuckGo, and seeing if things improve.