What's made you grumpy today?

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What's made you grumpy today?

Over the last couple of days, occasionally when moving to the next page of a thread, I get a full page advert pop up. Really very annoying.
Clicking the 'X' to dispose of the advert then moves me back to the first post of the thread, rather than the last position that I was at. Even more annoying.

Is this just me? Or is this a FF thing now? Whatever, it is not working, as I'm only interested in getting rid as it pops up, and have no recollection of any of the products advertised.

Aye, I’m the same, bit of a pain.

become "Ad Free" https://www.fiatforum.com/blogs/ben/14779-forum-friends.html
 

That actually makes me more grumpy.

Annoying ads pop up covering the whole page.

To get rid, it is suggested we are held to ransom.

Then the description in the link is confusing.
" become "Ad Free""
"we keep the normal advertisers happy that they are getting value for money for their subscriptions (everyone can see what they post, not just the friends) "

The second part seems to contradict the first. I've read it many times, but still cannot make sense of it.
ben Are you aware of the new full page ads? Is this something you've agreed to, or has Google slipped them in without permission? They all seem to be Google ads.
 
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Got something to be really grumpy about today. Mrs j has just told me she's had a "fishing" - or should it be Phishing? - email. It purported to be from one of her best friends and was asking for money. Luckily Mrs J, after she left the airlines, worked in school admin so is quite good with admin related "stuff". She did open the email to read it but didn't go near attachments or anything like that. Hopefully her iPad will not have been compromised. Her friend travels extensively and in particular often visits relatives who live out in the far east. HK, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, etc. This email said she was stranded at one of these locations and would Mrs J send £1000 to a stated bank so she could buy a ticket to get home. Mrs J immediately rang her friend, who was at home some 20 miles south of us, and was greeted with "Oh no, not another one!" It would seem that she's fallen foul of the recently reported data breech yahoo suffered last year. Looks like the email is being sent to everyone on her mailing list, which she tells us, is a lot of people as she's in market research so knows a lot of folk!

Looking closely at the offending email it looks very authentic and the only thing which gives it away is that her name has been written with a double M whereas it should have just one. In fact the email address is irrelevant as she was being asked to send the money to a bank address. Luckily we are, whilst still pretty clueless, at least somewhat "computer savvy" but so many of our friends, being of our generation and not having grown up with computers, are not. I can only hope no one has fallen foul of this. The one saving grace may be that it seems to have been quite an unsophisticated attempt, simply asking you to send money to a bank account. Probably as long as you don't do this you'll be in the clear?
 
"we keep the normal advertisers happy that they are getting value for money for their subscriptions (everyone can see what they post, not just the friends) "[/COLOR]
The second part seems to contradict the first. I've read it many times, but still cannot make sense of it.

subscription ads are the small one in the ff banner at the top, they are from FF sponsors who pay direct to advertise here.

Have you got your ad blocker switched on that comes with your browser?
ben4.jpg

Its not really held to ransom is it when the forum costs a fortune to host, if its not getting money from ads it needs to get it from somewhere or it will end up like lots of others and all the easy searchable info lost for ever :(
 
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subscription ads are the small one in the ff banner at the top, they are from FF sponsors who pay direct to advertise here.

Have you got your ad blocker switched on that comes with your browser?
View attachment 213366

Its not really held to ransom is it when the forum costs a fortune to host, if its not getting money from ads it needs to get it from somewhere or it will end up like lots of others and all the easy searchable info lost for ever :(

The ads here are fine - relevant to car enthusiasts and non intrusive. They don’t flash, they don’t follow you as you scroll, they don’t interrupt by appearing in the middle of things you’re reading etc. Very good and very fair way of paying for this fantastic online community.

Unfortunately, not all websites care so much for privacy or a good user experience. Hence the wide use of ad blockers.

Thankfully, online advertisers and trackers are losing the battle now with Apple leading the way in preventing them from playing their nasty tricks. This will help to solve the Nasty ads, and the advertisers who are doing it respectfully will be the ones who prevail - because online advertising certainly isn’t going away. But finally, the people are having somebody stand up to them.
 
The ads here are fine - relevant to car enthusiasts and non intrusive.

The ads are relevant to you! If you let google track you then it will deliver ads that to you seem perfectly acceptable and relevant.

I turn off all ad tracking so I get some really weird ads on here, at this very moment while writing this I have an ad above the text box for chat bots and below this I have an ad for “man-scaping”

When I logged on to the site just now the home page had an ad for horoscopes, so the only reason you get the ads you get is because you let Google and other companies track your preferences and profile you before feeding you ads targeted specifically at you and that they hope you will click on.

I turn these things off and block them because they can inappropriately follow you from one site to another. I work in healthcare so can be looking up information on illnesses or research papers, I don’t want Google delivering ads on things related to work.
 
The ads are relevant to you! If you let google track you then it will deliver ads that to you seem perfectly acceptable and relevant.

I bought Mrs Paddynabs a birthday present off t'internet. Within 5 minutes the ads banner appeared with her present on it (coat or something from Joe Browns). So I managed to turn it off and delete the history. The very next advert to appear when Mrs was on the computer was for sex toys.

My attempts to explain were met with incredulity....
 
The ads are relevant to you! If you let google track you then it will deliver ads that to you seem perfectly acceptable and relevant.

I bought Mrs Paddynabs a birthday present off t'internet. Within 5 minutes the ads banner appeared with her present on it (coat or something from Joe Browns). So I managed to turn it off and delete the history. The very next advert to appear when Mrs was on the computer was for sex toys.

My attempts to explain were met with incredulity....

This did make me laugh I've had a similar problem with ads for presents I’d looked at or bought
 
Perhaps it is all tax..
To discourage strangers visiting other houses.. just a thought

they would need to shut the site down completely to stop that, i am selling essential items from a business address not a home :( most of my customers don't even come to the unit, they just pick what they want and have it delivered.
Its owned by ebay they probably realised everyone had stopped using ebay and was using gumtree instead
 
The ads are relevant to you! If you let google track you then it will deliver ads that to you seem perfectly acceptable and relevant.

I bought Mrs Paddynabs a birthday present off t'internet. Within 5 minutes the ads banner appeared with her present on it (coat or something from Joe Browns). So I managed to turn it off and delete the history. The very next advert to appear when Mrs was on the computer was for sex toys.

My attempts to explain were met with incredulity....

Well, she could have met it with excitement and enthusiasm, and raised expectations for her birthday present.:D
 
Well, she could have met it with excitement and enthusiasm, and raised expectations for her birthday present.:D
I'm very much a laptop user, since my Hudl died anyway. Mrs J uses her iPad. She gets quite confused with my laptop so just doesn't use it. We share the iPad though because it does Facetime for contacting the kids and relatives who live abroad and we find it very much better to use compared to Skype.

This thing about adverts intrigues me in that I quite often get stuff popping up on my laptop relating to searches for stuff Mrs J has been looking at on her iPad but she almost never gets anything relating to my searches. We also notice that sometimes I get "inappropriate" suggestive/solicitous stuff appearing in my email (You know, suggestive, ussually Russian etc, "dating" sites.) She doesn't get this on the iPad. I don't "do" that sort of stuff, at my age I'm much more interested in looking at nice cars, exploring the latest SF book publications, or just "lurking" around on this or other car forums. The good thing is that mostly it appears in my Spam and I tend to just wipe spam periodically without even checking what it is.
 
If you use Chrome as your search and web browser, it collects information, and if at any time you've logged in and effectively created Google identities, browsing history will be shared across any platforms you use. This can be useful if using multiple machines for similar tasks, as recent search history will show, but can also be a little disconcerting.

Its all done by computers, without much human intervention. There is so much data, that no-one is really watching you specifically. Anyone following my internet history will get bored fairly quickly.

Apple products seem to be better at filtering out unwanted stuff, which could be why Mrs. J. does not see much of your history. Windows lets everything through, which seems to be the only way it can get its own rubbish at you.
 
This is also where “cookies” come in, basically a little piece of code put on your computer by one webpage that can be read by other websites equipped to do so, they can then see what websites and what other things you have been looking at or might have interests in.

A lot of fan made websites and forums are not full of 3rd party cookies as they don’t give any benefit to the site creators but with massive websites and sites that rely on things being shared they are full of these little trackers so the sort of sites your wife visits might be more likely to track her internet use then serve appropriate adverts for her, but the sites you may use yourself my not track what you’re doing so much.

Next time you visit a site and see the little “accept cookies” box pop up go in and see if exactly just how many different places or companies are tracking your presence on that one website, sometimes it can be hundreds of companies all monitoring your internet use from one website, and some will record exactly where you clicked on the page to leave or move on to other things to work out how they can increase the likelihood of your selecting and clicking things it can get all very sinister and the worst offenders of this are people like Facebook, google etc who sell advertising based specifically on being able to exactly target people who might be interested in one particular thing
 
If you use Chrome as your search and web browser, it collects information, and if at any time you've logged in and effectively created Google identities, browsing history will be shared across any platforms you use. This can be useful if using multiple machines for similar tasks, as recent search history will show, but can also be a little disconcerting.

Its all done by computers, without much human intervention. There is so much data, that no-one is really watching you specifically. Anyone following my internet history will get bored fairly quickly.

Apple products seem to be better at filtering out unwanted stuff, which could be why Mrs. J. does not see much of your history. Windows lets everything through, which seems to be the only way it can get its own rubbish at you.
Thanks PB I think that probably pretty much explains it!
 
This is also where “cookies” come in, basically a little piece of code put on your computer by one webpage that can be read by other websites equipped to do so, they can then see what websites and what other things you have been looking at or might have interests in.

A lot of fan made websites and forums are not full of 3rd party cookies as they don’t give any benefit to the site creators but with massive websites and sites that rely on things being shared they are full of these little trackers so the sort of sites your wife visits might be more likely to track her internet use then serve appropriate adverts for her, but the sites you may use yourself my not track what you’re doing so much.

Next time you visit a site and see the little “accept cookies” box pop up go in and see if exactly just how many different places or companies are tracking your presence on that one website, sometimes it can be hundreds of companies all monitoring your internet use from one website, and some will record exactly where you clicked on the page to leave or move on to other things to work out how they can increase the likelihood of your selecting and clicking things it can get all very sinister and the worst offenders of this are people like Facebook, google etc who sell advertising based specifically on being able to exactly target people who might be interested in one particular thing
Thanks Andy. I try never to voluntarily allow cookies by clicking acceptance but a lot of stuff still gets through. I make a point of doing an "advanced" wipe every week to try to minimize the problem but, no matter how I try to configure the wipe, if I set up to wipe enough stuff it always wipes my log in details for everything so I then have to reenter, for instance, my log in details for the forum. Very annoying. I also run a whole computer scan with my embedded Avira free once a week but I don't think that is designed to address this sort of thing.

Trouble is that, although I don't think I particularly get into anything which carries a high level of risk, I fear my ignorance is probably laying me open to "baddies" and I'm just too mean to buy one of these all singing and dancing security suites.
 
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