Commflash adverts hijacking Photo.net downloads

[s_wan]

Just wondering if I'm alone in receiving advertisements from

Commflash for domain setup and webspace when I'm expecting something

else from Photo.net to be downloaded. There doesn't appear to be any

particular pattern, it seemingly occurs at random and I've had about

3 or four over the last few months, the last one occuring when I

tried to access Phillips page on filters...

 

Does this have something to do with Photo.nets ISP? Is Photo.net

being targetted with what is effectively spam? Is there anything

that Photo.net can do to prevent it?<div></div>

[emaxxman]

I don't get that particular ad. I do get one for Circuit City. I only get it while on photo.net. I get it on both my work laptop and home PC. I've never gone to the Circuit City website.

[bobatkins]

Only Brian can say for sure, but I assume it's supplied by one of the advertising services that photo.net uses.

 

I've seen it too, but maybe once or twice in the last year.

 

Photo.net needs advertising revenue to operate. Nobody really likes advertising, but it's a "necessary evil". Normally the ads are pretty low key and confined to banner ads in the header, but I guess once in a while something more obvious is served. Websites can't usually specify EXACTLY which ads are presented by agencies like tribalfusion, though they can specify categories of ads. I think the ads photo.net uses are either normally photography, technology or non-profit.

[basscheffers]

I had it. Wish we could go back to the good old days of GIF banners, not iframes in which the advertisers can take full control of the browser frame.

 

When I got this a few weeks ago, I thought it was full size pop-up and closed it. Only to lose where I was. Nice.

[brainbubba_motornapkins]

Install popupkiller or a similar product. Also Spybot and Adaware are good at rooting out unwanted commercial activity on your pc (cookies, registry entries, browser hijacks etc.)

[mottershead]

We have popups and popunders blocked from the ad network to which we belong. However, I think this is what is called a "full-page interstitial ad". It is not technically a popup, in that a new browser window is not opened. Instead, it is being done for a few seconds in the same browser window. I will have to check whether we can stop these; I think they are pretty rare (or else we would be making a lot more ad revenue, since these pay well). Are they really that much of a problem?

[andrew_buzzell]

I *really* doubt this is coming from photo.net. I've never seen one, and I spend quite a bit of time here. You probably have a browser hijack that you've picked up elsewhere. See this for details:

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0061JP

[emaxxman]

Brian,

 

As long as the editorial integrity of the site is not affected, I'm fine with the ads. I just simply close them. I deal with ads on most other sites therefore it's not that big of deal to deal with it here.

[StuartMoxham]

I had my machine hijacked by ad8.com. I kept getting little pop up windows everytime I came here and other places too. Nothing to do with PN I may say. I did some research on the web and I found 2 files in my windows folder winshow.dll and winshow.cfg I would seem they make a connection to their add server when you connect to the internet. I restarted my machine deleted the 2 files and all of the cookies in my browser cache now all is fine again. I jsut dont know how the files got there I have not installed anything since January. I hope this may help other who have been geting this proplem. I use my fire wall all the time now also.

[Wayne Melia]

I've never had it either, and I spend a lot of time on PN. Suspect. as said above, a hijack or other scumware. Suggest getting spybot or similar.

[mottershead]

I'm not sure it is a hijack. I think it is coming from Tribal Fusion but I'm having a little trouble figuring out which advertiser it is. If you see it again, can you let us know what web site you end up on if you click it? We can block ads by domain. Also, these type of ads are supposed to appear only while the photo.net page is loading, and go away after a few seconds so that you see the intended photo.net page.

 

We only have 468x60 banner ads enabled (and one page with 600x120 "skyscraper" ads), but some of these could be running Javascript that fills the entire page. In the TF report, there are a couple of campaigns that might be doing this; it is hard to tell. If they are, there would only have been a few hundred instances of this in the last 30 days, and probably you would see it at most once per day. This is out of tens of millions of pages served per month. Only the "Equipment" and "ezShop" sections of the site have paid ads, not the Forums or the Gallery.

[bobatkins]

I probably spend more time on photo.net than anyone else (or at least if anyone is spending more time than me, we both need to get a life!). I see these things very infrequently. Maybe once a month, maybe less often. They're so rare I really can't remember. They're no big deal and if they generate revenue for photo.net I'd say leave them alone. Basically we need the revenue. If they showed up between every page load I'd object, but they don't. Even hitting the equipment and EZ-shop sections pretty hard (I just tried it) I haven't had this add appear.

 

BTW the only ad of this type I've seen is the one in the image above.

[bobatkins]

Just found a Circuit City popup. It's a real popup. Appeared in the EZ-shop section.<div></div>

[nikos]

I have seen the full page transitional ad, on the ezShop section I think, maybe 2-3 times in all the years I'm using photo.net

 

Even though I normally hate ads, especially the in-your-face category that the fullpage transitional fall in, I don't mind if photo.net keeps running them at the current low occurence rate. Photo.net provides a lot of value to me and I must be generating thousands of page views per week. If one in ten thousand is delayed by a passing ad (the frequency may be even lower actually) I feel I would be a moron, a nitpicker and a whiner to complain.

[mottershead]

The interstitial ad is not a mistake by TF, and I think there is an ad-blocking setting that we could enable to block those if they are objectionable. (This would be too bad, because we would probably end up also blocking some other types of ads that have a pretty high CPM compared to regular banners.)

 

Regarding the pop-up that Bob found, that looks to me like an error by TF. We are supposed to be blocking the popups, and I have checked the settings and they seem to be correct. If the Javascript that is coming down sometimes from TF/Circuit City does a pop-up, then probably the ad has not been categorized properly at some point along the way. Fortunately, it seems to be an isolated mistake. There is one line in our report from Tribal Fusion for a "PU" campaign from Circuit City, and there have been only 630 of them in the last 30 days, out of a total of several hundred thousand ad impressions across all campaigns. And there aren't any other "PU" campaigns in the listing.