Why popup adds?

grimm100 · Post by **grimm100** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 8:55 pm

Ok, this is a pet peeve of mine. Why are you allowing popup ads on your site now?

I don't care if you allow ads all you want. I submit data probably 4+ times a week and am trying to help in that way. But lately everytime I come to your site I get a POPUP!

I will stop submitting if you leave those in, that is the most annoying type of ad on the planet and it will drive me away.

Please reconsider your use of popup ads.

Skyfire · Post by **Skyfire** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 9:33 pm

I've had no popups from this site... even when I was using IE.

:/

Post by **Rollie** » Fri Jun 29, 2007 11:33 pm

There should not be any popup ads. If there are, then one of my ad networks is letting them through, and it can be very hard for me to figure out which one it is.

If possible, can you get a screenshot of the pop up ad, as well as the ads that are currently displaying on the site? In addition, if you can get the link that you would get if you clicked it, that will often tell me which network is serving the ad.

I have directly disabled all pop ups for here and there should be none getting through.

Also, can you tell me what country you live in?

Phreeze · Post by **Phreeze** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 8:10 am

i bet he has malware, adware and so on on his computer..

grimm100 · Post by **grimm100** » Sat Jun 30, 2007 2:02 pm

No, no malware. I am a system engineer. And it ONLY happens on this site. None other that I go to.

I will pay attention to the page it was on next time and get the requested info.

Phreeze · Post by **Phreeze** » Sun Jul 01, 2007 4:56 am

i'm using Firefox with adblock plus and havent seen ads/popups on this site ever...strange

Eyeball-Dragonmaw · Post by **Eyeball-Dragonmaw** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 12:15 pm

Ok. I happened to be browsing some old topics, and ran across this one. Actually today I saw a pop up ad on the Graph sections of the site under daily, weekly activity. Anytime the word GAME is in the text it reloads the page with the GAME word hyperlinked, and when you mouse over it shows a pop up from Vibrant Advertising.

http://www.warcraftrealms.com/activity.php
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyactivity.php
http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyfactionactivity.php

Actually I think I solved my own problem. I recently switched from Cable to DSL, and it comes with Windows LiveSearch. So any recognizable search terms it converts to links with mouseover pop ups from Vibrant Advertising.

Post by **Rollie** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 12:39 pm

Ah, those aren't the type of pop ups I'm referring to. If you get a pop up in the old sense where it pops a new window either above or below are the ones that should not be there.

The hyperlink hover pops are allowed atm.

Skyfire · Post by **Skyfire** » Tue Aug 14, 2007 1:07 pm

And those can be disabled, if you want. Unfortunately, that works by way of cookie, so deleting all your cookies makes the links reappear.

xpolockx · Post by **xpolockx** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 2:52 am

it was mentioned earlier in another thread a long time ago, but there is a firefox addon that disables all hyperlinks... don't have time to search for it atm, but it's there

WyriHaximus · Post by **WyriHaximus** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 7:37 am

xpolockx wrote:it was mentioned earlier in another thread a long time ago, but there is a firefox addon that disables all hyperlinks... don't have time to search for it atm, but it's there

You mean adblock and then list the popup JS script?

xpolockx · Post by **xpolockx** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 6:26 pm

It's a greasemonkey script called disable text ads or something like that. It's worked great for me

lordexin · Post by **lordexin** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:20 pm

grimm100 wrote:No, no malware. I am a system engineer. And it ONLY happens on this site. None other that I go to.

I will pay attention to the page it was on next time and get the requested info.

Just because you're a system engineer doesn't mean you magically avoid all harmful programs. Also, if you're relying on all the virus scans/spyare/adware/malware/you-name-it scans, there's a chance the kid who made the harmful program is intelligent. Me and my friend made a trojan that could keylog/open websites/more-fun-stuff that we tested and was undetectable by NOD32, AVG, Mcaffe, and Norton (Those were the only four scanners we tested because we felt it was unnecessary to continue testing at that point.) Personally, this is why I don't download virus scananers, because they ONLY detect programs that are listed for them to detect/certains lines of code and they just bog down your overall system performance with all that kernal crap they have running in the background. So you could pay money for the next "SECURITY UPDATE!" but when you download it, OOPS!, too late, you already had the virus they just added to the list on your computer, and it has done its damage.

Aside from all that random nonsense, my point to you, "System Engineer," is that even if you're smart enough to not rely on virus protection software, being a System Engineer doesn't make you immune to harmful programs. Do you know where MOST harmful software comes from? The answer is popups. (My sources? Personal experience.) So upon browsing some random site, and you get a popup, there is a possibility that the popup triggered a background download into your system root, and then you're screwed. I've had that happen while browsing a Family Guy website on my laptop. I got a popup and closed it, but behind the scenes there was an application downloaded which altered my boot files. Turns out I couldn't start Windows back up, but it was an easy fix as all it did was change the boot.ini file.

Again, my apologies for rambling, but upon refreshing the site for ~5 minutes all I got that looked relatively close to a popup was this:

That isn't even a popup but it looks like one, perhaps this is what you mean by "popup"? If it isn't, I really suggest looking into some sort of software problem, as even this site's owner doesn't recognize any intentional input of popup ads. I use a personally created web browser with no pop up protection whatsoever and do not get popups ever on this site.

/* Begin comment
My intentions of making this long post wasn't to
be a jerk, but rather to make my first WarcraftRealms
post as informative and useful as I possibly could.
Please forgive me if I overdid this.
End comment */

Post by **Rollie** » Mon Sep 24, 2007 7:41 pm

Ya, what you see in the image attached is just the intellitext hover windows and is expected behavior.

lordexin · Post by **lordexin** » Fri Sep 28, 2007 12:39 pm

TheDeamon wrote:
lordexin wrote:if you're relying on all the virus scans/spyare/adware/malware/you-name-it scans, there's a chance the kid who made the harmful program is intelligent. Me and my friend made a trojan that could keylog/open websites/more-fun-stuff that we tested and was undetectable by NOD32, AVG, Mcaffe, and Norton (Those were the only four scanners we tested because we felt it was unnecessary to continue testing at that point.) Personally, this is why I don't download virus scananers, because they ONLY detect programs that are listed for them to detect/certains lines of code and they just bog down your overall system performance with all that kernal crap they have running in the background. So you could pay money for the next "SECURITY UPDATE!" but when you download it, OOPS!, too late, you already had the virus they just added to the list on your computer, and it has done its damage.
This is how most anti-virus programs work. You might find some which might be a little more pro-active and monitor for certain behaviors but the cost on having one doing that is your system takes a major performance hit in the process. (Cure is worse than the potential problem)

Otherwise, the anti-virus industry is relying on end users/computer security people to notice a new "strain" of computer viruses, so that people can quantify what the characteristics of the new virus is. Which is the point in time where they push a "virus definition file" update to their end users with the information on the new virus.

So it isn't that much a feat to be able to create a virus/trojan that evades the notice of an anti-virus program. Chances are pretty good that it wouldn't be noticed by the "right people" until it had infected several thousand systems.

That being said, there are people who are still getting infected by viruses that were released into "the wild" of cyberspace over 10 years ago, as they're still making the rounds c/o people who have no clue what the practice of "safe hex" is.

An anti-virus program, no matter how good it is, cannot protect you from the virus that was unleashed 10 minutes ago. What it probably can protect you from is that virus which has been running around for weeks or longer.

Yes, obviuosly that is the case, but most "viruses" don't need weeks to perform their task, thus you would be screwed over before the anti-"virus" company discovered it. That is how all these "virus" creators operate, they make their toy, they get it out to people, and they immediately begin to create new one. It is simply a game of repetition which provides satisfaction for those who like to harm other people. (In the case of adware like in this thread, you're looking at monetary satisfaction.)