I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience on our site but I wanted to issue a warning. We do not accept any advertising that is in anyway pop-up or pop-under.
Today I had an issue going to one of our pages that a “pop-up” ad came into view and obscured the HumorOutcasts page. At the bottom it said special offer from HumorOutcasts. I knew it wasn’t and tried to close the ad. Two more warning boxes came up attempting to get me to click on ok.
At first I thought our website had been hacked, but after some checking around that does not appear to be the case. We do use 3rd parties to provide ads and it is possible that was the source.
To our loyal users let me I want to pass this along:
- We do not, and will not ever accept any ads that pop-up and obscure the page.
- If you ever run into an ad on this or any other site that refuses to close and tells you that you will miss out on a great deal if you don’t click okay, disregard this message. NEVER click ok! it is the fastest way to get your computer infected. Instead, use task manager to close the browser application (Internet Explorer, Firefox etc.) and use the “End Now” button if it complains about not being able to stop something.
- If you run into such an ad, please let us know by e-mailing Betsy at betsy@humoroutcasts.com. If this continues, we will try to get at the source even if it means switching our Ad provider.
UPDATE3: Our primary ad provider claims they have fixed the problem so we have re-enabled them. We will keep an eye our site to see if we see any indication of this returning.
Those ads are SOOOOO annoying. Makes you wonder about the @*#*&(@ who came up with the idea. I would NEVER purchase anything from a company that annoyed me as much as those ads do.
Yeah!
UPDATE: We have been in contact with our primary Ad server and they are aware that this has happened on other sites that serve their ads and they are working on a resolution. We provided them with information regarding the incidence on our site.
We have not taken down the ads from that service at this time but we will if this continues. Please let Betsy know if this ad pushing an iPad takes over your browser.
UPDATE2: Our stats indicate that this occurred two more times today. So we have disabled the ads from the provider that is the source of the problem. You still see ads because they are being served by our backup provider. Once we get word from our primary source of ads that they have fixed the problem we will re-enable them.