Please gather all issues related to advertising here. Thanks.
If you see annoying ads that:
- Play Audio automatically (having the option to unmute or play which then starts the audio does not count)
- expand automatically (ie grows outside of it's usual space without any interaction)
- any popup (whether within the site, virus warning popup... anything popping up!)
- any redirection
- adult ads
Please let us know. We'll try to remove them. We have filters set to not display such ads to begin with. But some seems to slip by.
How to identify and report?
Well, more information the better. Information that could help are: (most important to least important)
- The page that you were viewing when the bad ad occurred (could be included in screenshot). Critical! Without this information, we can't take any action because we don't know what caused it.
- Screenshot - A good screenshot should show it's placement of the ad with respect to its page. In otherwise, post everything, not just the ad itself.
Sample of a good screenshot. Sample of bad screenshot. - Your Operating System & Browser.
- Name of the advertiser such as the brand.
- Link the ad points to (do not click please, just hover and find out if you can. If not, oh well. It's not the most useful info).
And if you're slightly more technically gifted, the source around the ad itself.If you're technically gifted. See #8.- Please DO NOT add a hyper-link (clickable) to a bad website. Meaning, if you want to write down their address, replace "http" with something like "hxxp" so that it doesn't become a clickable link. We don't want to give the baddies more points by giving them referring links in the eyes of search engines.
- If you want to be SUPER helpful. Forward me a copy of the HAR data that resulted in the ad. To get this, you need something like Chrome's [Developer Tools] > [Network] already open before getting to the page. Afterwards, right click on the network traffic and copy all info as HAR. WARNING: This data may contain sensitive information that you should never post to the public. PM Grumpy the data or email me ([email protected]).
Thank you!
Just as a footnote, any ads that violates any of the specification above is a violation of the advertisers own Terms and Conditions. Though I will try to manually remove problematic ones, many are often removed by the advertisers themselves as they don't want it either.
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Note: This post is written by Grumpy, not mhh.
Should a specific ad network become unbearable, I will replace them with these until issues are resolved even if it takes forever.
Edited by Grumpy, 25 April 2014 - 02:27 AM.