I remember the time when it was possible to browse the webs with ads safely to support sites. Nowadays it's impossible, sadly.
Between the invasive obtrusive ads like the one you encountered and the various trojans and infected ads, it's just a gamble.
Comment has been collapsed.
whole reason I have a variety of ad blocking extensions enabled. I have tried visiting a site to figure out what liquids to use for smoothies on my phone... within 5 seconds my phone had opened amazon shopping app and had at least 8 ads running... I closed it immediately to never return.
I visit SG more than enough to pay the reasonable cost to remove it here at least. I would consider paying for youtube premium... if it didn't charge so much, will never pay for prime video ad free though... wish it would stop asking every time I go over there >>
Comment has been collapsed.
Heh oh yeah phone ads are even worse. No control at all ofc because that's how Google wants it. Installing ad blockers on phones is not as easy for sure.
That reminds me of that time my gf was checking her texts in the middle of a family dinner and she clicked a link that led to a huge ad for some porn game and the very very extremely loud sound that went with it xD
Her mom was not pleased.
Comment has been collapsed.
Well, 99.9% of the time I like the ads on SG. They are inobtrusive, interesting, and useful. It was just this one that was all wrong.
Comment has been collapsed.
Unfortunately ads are often geo-located so site owners don't have total control over what kind of ads users will see in every country.
The ads I'm getting are mostly completely irrelevant (and sometimes gross, don't ask me wtf is wrong with French ads) but they are generally not intrusive.
Comment has been collapsed.
This reminds me why I started to use add block, a couple decades ago.
I was playing some browser game ad the time and it had add banners on the side np.
But the issue was, it was on a rotation basis even if you did not switch/ reload the page.
One of the adds was for a pirate game, which was with sound while all others where mute. Every time the canons went off, I got a heart attack because that add had volume on ultra somehow. And I was playing music in the background.
After a couple times I was sick off it downloaded my first add block and never looked back.
Comment has been collapsed.
One of the adds was for a pirate game, which was with sound while all others where mute. Every time the canons went off, I got a heart attack because that add had volume on ultra somehow. And I was playing music in the background.
lol that happened to me once as I was playing a very stealthy horror game, sneaking around with light music on Youtube playing in my headphones in the background. For some reason my adblocker malfunctioned and my playlist was interrupted by an ad starting with a scream that would have been enough to blow off the roof. My ears ran for several hours.
Now I only unblock for sites I trust (and there are few as most sites don't have any control over what kind of ads are shown in other countries) and sites I want to support.
Comment has been collapsed.
Hi Microfish, there shouldn't be any full screen advertisements on SteamGifts. I only run standard banner ads at the moment (no pop-ups, overlays, stick footer ads, etc). If you did see a full screen advertisement, it could be some type of malware or browser add-on you have triggering it. However, it could potentially be our ad network. All the major ad networks are running a heavy amount of JavaScript. They screen advertisements for anything that shouldn't be there, but occasionally something slips through. It's rare, they get flagged and quickly removed, but it has happened a couple of times over the years. If you see it again, take a screenshot and share. If anyone else has the same issue, also let me know, and I'll get it reported.
Comment has been collapsed.
Thank you so very much, CG, for your response! I will keep this in mind and do what you say. Thankfully it hasn't happened since that one time.
Comment has been collapsed.
I write this just in case.π€ooOοΌπ»π¦ πΎοΌ
What I can think of personally is that the DNS settings of the router may be contaminated to display those ads.
(This is only an example, as it may be caused by malicious software, applications or add-ons.)
If people's have an older router, don't forget to update the firmware. (Usually a reboot of the router will do this automatically in most cases.)
If people's router firmware hasn't been out for about two years, you should suspect that you may need to replace it because the security update may be over.
(In most cases, you can contact the seller's support and they will tell you if they continue to update or if the support is no longer available.)π΅βπΈπ§
Comment has been collapsed.
Hi cg. Since a week ago, this pop-up appears every now and then when browsing any giveaway list. It doesn't appear on discussions nor any giveaway page. The frame doesn't let me to do anything else than click the button. I searched about that btloader and it's related to ads but couldn't find why it's showing up. What I do is reload the page and the frame disappear until another ocassion few minutes later. Please, could you take a look on it?
Comment has been collapsed.
Let me preface this by stating that I don't mind ads here on SG; i really do not. I leave the ad-blocker turned off for this site in hopes of doing my bit to help @cg with server costs. But today, when I opened SG for the first time, there was a full-screen ad that went up to within 1 cm of the very edges of my monitor. I clicked on this several times and then it faded to a 2-3cm tall ad across the bottom. Then it popped up the "X to close" option.
My first thought was that SG had been closed and I was seeing one of those "this domain is for sale" messages from the server. That made me very sad indeed. None of Steamgifts showed through or around this advert. (I didn't recognize the company the ad was for, either, which added to my confusion. I doublechecked the URL to make sure I hadn't been redirected anywhere.)
This was quite annoying when I realized it was an ad. Please limit the number of these "full-screen overlay"-style ads in the future.
Thank you for reading this, and for running this wonderful website!
Comment has been collapsed.