+Tsegi Mike and Desert Viking Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 Today when I logged caches, I noticed on the page where I type out my log entry that I was getting advertisements for sears and joann craft websites. Conveniently sites I had visited in this past week. I thought this site would remain ad free, except for the various geocaching related ads. Will this be something I should expect from now on? (I had no idea where to put this thread. If it gets moved, please let me know which forum it should go on so I can find it again.) Quote Link to comment
+cerberus1 Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 Yep, the norm now. No notice. Things change. This was a kinda-recent reminder that it really is afterall, a business. Quote Link to comment
+Bunya Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 What I want to know is how to get rid of it! I find having ads flickering at the edge of my vision infuriating and distracting. I think being PM should entitle us to be free of this. Quote Link to comment
Mr.Yuck Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 It's standard Google Adsense ads. Mrs. Yuck bought a Subaru in December, so I was all over the the Subaru USA website around then. When these targeted ads first appeared (and I'll say it was late Jan./Early Feb.) I was seeing ads for a Subaru dealer about 60 miles from my house. There was a thread back then. Oh, the targeted according to your surfing habit ones only seem to appear on any kind of search page. Like a zip code search for example. Quote Link to comment
Pup Patrol Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 I never see any ads. Where are they showing up? Oh, yeah, I have that ad-blocker thingy on my computer, maybe that's why I don't see any. B. Quote Link to comment
+The A-Team Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 What I want to know is how to get rid of it! Google the following: "ad blocker [insert your browser name here]" Like Pup Patrol, I haven't seen an ad on this website for years, at least on my home computers. I only see them in my browser at work where I can't install an ad blocker. Quote Link to comment
+Bunya Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 What I want to know is how to get rid of it! Google the following: "ad blocker [insert your browser name here]" Like Pup Patrol, I haven't seen an ad on this website for years, at least on my home computers. I only see them in my browser at work where I can't install an ad blocker. Thanks. I'll try that. Quote Link to comment
+cerberus1 Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 It's standard Google Adsense ads. Mrs. Yuck bought a Subaru in December, so I was all over the the Subaru USA website around then. When these targeted ads first appeared (and I'll say it was late Jan./Early Feb.) I was seeing ads for a Subaru dealer about 60 miles from my house. There was a thread back then. Yeah. And I still didn't get the curvy one... Quote Link to comment
+Tsegi Mike and Desert Viking Posted March 21, 2013 Author Share Posted March 21, 2013 Thanks. Its the first time I noticed them. I tend to have multiple screens open so I can keep an eye on something in the background. The ad part of the page is usually hidden from my view lol. Quote Link to comment
+The_Incredibles_ Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 Interesting. I get ads, but they all seem to be geocaching related. Never paid much attention to them, honestly, before reading this thread. Guess I have an internal ad-blocker. Quote Link to comment
+terratin Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 Did you click on a malicious link somewhere? I read somewhere else on the forum that this could be the case if you see these kind of ads on the geocaching website. Quote Link to comment
Mr.Yuck Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 Did you click on a malicious link somewhere? I read somewhere else on the forum that this could be the case if you see these kind of ads on the geocaching website. No, someone said that in the other thread!! On any kind of search page, you will see non-geocaching ads, often targeted to your surfing habits. Ads never bothered me much in general, so I don't run any kind of ad blocker. Quote Link to comment
+MartyBartfast Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 Did you click on a malicious link somewhere? I read somewhere else on the forum that this could be the case if you see these kind of ads on the geocaching website. No, someone said that in the other thread!! On any kind of search page, you will see non-geocaching ads, often targeted to your surfing habits. Ads never bothered me much in general, so I don't run any kind of ad blocker. A few days ago a Conservative MP in the UK tweeted that he thought it was inappropriate that a Labour party press release carried an advert for an "Arab girls" dating site. Then someone pointed out that the press release carried a Google adsense banner which displays adverts based on the viewer's browsing habits - Oops. Full story here Quote Link to comment
+murrayegger Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=308782 Quote Link to comment
Mr.Yuck Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 http://forums.Groundspeak.com/GC/index.php?showtopic=308782 That would be information for a company, say a Geocoin manufacturer, who wanted to advertise on Geocaching.com. Not really close to what the OP was talking about, if you don't mind me saying. In addition to my Subaru story, I have within the last month taken over server admin duties for a website. Not that I know what the heck I'm doing there, but I digress. This particular website is hosted on the well-known host Rackspace. Just from logging into Rackspace.com about 10 times in the last couple weeks, I see Google Adsense Ads for "The Rackspace Cloud" all over the friggin' internet, including on Geocaching.com search pages. These are just the observations of someone who was never bothered much by internet ads, and apparently even looks at them. Quote Link to comment
+NYPaddleCacher Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 What I want to know is how to get rid of it! Google the following: "ad blocker [insert your browser name here]" Like Pup Patrol, I haven't seen an ad on this website for years, at least on my home computers. I only see them in my browser at work where I can't install an ad blocker. While Adblocker (specifically, Ad Block Plus, or ADP) is a great piece of software it does not come without a cost. Although it's open source and can be downloaded for free, everytime a web page request is made, the browser has to execute that extra bit of code. I would prefer that unsolicited Ads were never included with the content I'm asking for so that I would have to use an ad blocker that reduces performance. Probably every one here uses some sort of anti-virus/malware/trojan horse detection software (aka, Endpoint Security) on their computer. Whenever I check the lists of processes running on one of the computers I'm working on, I find that the real-time detection endpoint security application is *always* the biggest consumer of memory and compute resources. According to a Global Security Analyst paper I found, "Global market revenues for Endpoint Security are expected to surpass $5.0 billion by 2017." I'd much rather prefer it if that money could be used to identify and prosecute those that create viruses, malware, etc. instead of forcing the consumer to pay (both financially, and a reduction of performance) to block these intrusions after the fact. That $5.0 billion also doesn't include the lost in productivity and revenue when Endpoint Security fails, which I suspect far surpasses that figure. While the cost of blocking commercial ads pales in comparison to an endpoint security approach, that strategy for dealing with unwanted data is essentially the same. Quote Link to comment
+MountainWoods Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 This may be getting a bit technical, but read on if it interests you. I always go into my browser's privacy settings and require that it ASK me whether I want to accept cookies for any new site that I go to. When I hit a new site, it will ask me to accept or block AND with the option to remember the answer for all future visits (so I don't keep being asked every time). Yes, that means that I get a few of these browser (not AD!) pop-ups asking me what to do with cookies, but I don't mind. I never accept cookies from google, nor from any site that is NOT the site I am visiting. What I mean is, that if my search shows that I can find such-and-so at site www.abcdef.net and I click on it, if the browser says that bozotheclown.pester.com wants to save a cookie on my PC I say NO (and remember that answer permanently for bozotheclown.pester.com!). If www.abcdef.net wants to save a cookie, that's OK, because that's the site I'm intentionally going to. What this does is cripple the ad auto-generators from knowing what you like. Generally those ad generators do not (and cannot) use the cookies from the sites that you actually wanted to go to, like www.abcdef.net. Instead, they are using the cookies that would have been quietly saved on your PC that were NOT from www.abcdef.net, unless like me you have the privacy setting switched to ASK, and you refuse them. As a result, those google ad-generators cannot figure out anything about me. The web page designers have some kind of agreement that the ad-generator can look at the current page and try to throw out ads based on the content.* But without the cookies being enabled, the ad-generator can't remember the content when I navigate to a different page. * Footnote: I've seen some humorous misinterpretations of current page content in some of the ads generated. I remember being in a very nebulous page in the everythingdulcimer.com discussion pages, and the ad generator was seeing something that thought that we were looking for sexy negligees or something. It wasn't just randomly generated, because everyone who visited the discussion thread kept getting randomly-generated ads within the same market. And of course, once they started remarking on it, that only fed the flame! Quote Link to comment
+TheWeatherWarrior Posted March 21, 2013 Share Posted March 21, 2013 Should click on the ads, makes money for Groudspeak. That is if you think they need more money ;-) Previously they were suppose to be "geocaching" related per their own policy, but apparently even Groundspeak doesn't follow it's own rules. ;-) Quote Link to comment
+Harry Dolphin Posted March 23, 2013 Share Posted March 23, 2013 Mostly, I just ignore them. But when the StarCraft ad comes up, I get a pop-up stating "The webpage wants to run the following add-on AMD Steady V... " It is very annoying to keep getting that pop-up. Quote Link to comment
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