Today when I logged in I noticed a message asking that ad blockers be turned off so that ads could appear and money made by the site. Well, I confess to being one of those people that uses ad blockers and only recently began using them when I noticed a lot of maleware and several virus' being installed on my computer by supposedly innocent maleware. I tried putting up with it because I really do like getting some of those ads that I no longer see. But the constant pop-ups, site redirection and home page changing just got old.

So if the ownership can get rid of those ads that are responsible for these types of action, then I would gladly easing off on my cookie management and allow safe ads to load.

Thanks for listening.

Hi Cary,
Which ads are you referring to? As far as I am aware none of our advertisers install any kind of apps or malware by clicking on an ad. As a web developer and now 20+ year user of the Internet I can say with some authority that clicking on a link never installs malware. However if you click on a link and then get a pop-up that says "Norton needs to be updated, click here"... well then you are going to get yourself into trouble. Windows and most other OS make it pretty difficult to affect your PC unless you give an app permission to install.

I am going to assume you are referring to the right side Google Adsense ads? If so you could always opt to just block those ads and leave up the industry ads on the rest of the site.

Thanks,
Jim

Hi Jim. Thanks for the reply. Honestly, I don't know which ads are causing the problem. It may even be coming from some other site. All I know is when I installed Anti Maleware and Anti Spyware programs the problems stopped. I'd be happy to just block those sites that you mentioned but how do I determine whether they are Google Adsense ads or not? I am far from being computer literate and would appreciate any help you can give.

Thanks, Cary

From what I understand, you have a virus. One possibility is a problem with Google Extensions. I had one that kept reinstalling itself. Just turn it "off". The other possibility is that you need to run a startup scan, as the virus may have compromised your system files.

Generally speaking a virus will ultimately cause your system to crash or die. Malware programs are designed to remain hidden so that they can do their task. Those tasks often being to change ads out on sites (so the Malware writer gets their own ads on sites and generates $$ from them). If you start to see ads for things on sites that don't look like they should be there (porn for example) then you should probably run MalwareBytes ( https://www.malwarebytes.org ) which is really good at finding and removing malware.

Cary - The Google Adsense ads are the large spaces usually on the right-hand side of our sites that run all sorts of ads. Mine are showing Amazon ads for items I recently searched there.

Cheers,
Jim

Mine are for moomoos?

I sort of compromised. I became a Kitmaker subscriber which does reduce the number of ads but on the other hand my AdBlocker Plus is up and running (and will remain so). Since I have had that up, my Malwarebytes/BitDefender have not been so busy. To toot my own horn I have 30+ years in the 'IT' field and I can safely say 'Seen it, Done it'

Cheers

Thanks to everyone for their replies. I am current using McAfee for virus' and such, Malewarebytes and Spybot Search and Destroy. All of these are paid for and not the free versions. McAfee runs a weekly scan on everything. The other two run daily scans early in the morning. I'll play around with those things that I have purposely blocked and try to come to a happy medium. I have to say though that since I have tightened up my security the pop-ups have gone away as have all the nuisance ads. And that's not just on this site but everywhere I go.

This may sound strange, I had an issue with my PC and nothing found anything amiss; One day I had lost my internet connection when I started the PC up and decided to run a scan, that did find some nasties lurking in the circuits.