Clickbait advertising on the forum

[Kite159]

Is it just me who has noticed an increase of clickbait advertising on the forum, including some which includes GIFs.

Ie 'girl wears transparent shirts in public, click for the photos' complete with a large chested lady bouncing her breasts
Or 'tragic news for random celebrity'. Which most likely leads to dodgy websites.

, I know adverts is one way this forum is funded, but it certainly making me considering installing an adblock. After all some legendary celebrity lives alone (or with partner) in multiple places depending where my tablet is located that day.

 

[DelW]

Is it just me who has noticed an increase of clickbait advertising on the forum, including some which includes GIFs.

Ie 'girl wears transparent shirts in public, click for the photos' complete with a large chested lady bouncing her breasts
Or 'tragic news for random celebrity'. Which most likely leads to dodgy websites.

, I know adverts is one way this forum is funded, but it certainly making me considering installing an adblock. After all some legendary celebrity lives alone (or with partner) in multiple places depending where my tablet is located that day.

I suspect that the lady in question (who's also visible at the top of my screen currently) is either AI generated or at least AI edited.

I also get a lot of similar adverts proclaiming a variety of female TV presenters improbably "flaunting [her] huge size" in supposed bikini pictures. Probably also AI produced (I have no intention of finding out).

I suspect we'll get a lot more of this sort of clickbait slop inflicted on us across all sorts of websites.

 

[AlterEgo]

Is it just me who has noticed an increase of clickbait advertising on the forum, including some which includes GIFs.

Ie 'girl wears transparent shirts in public, click for the photos' complete with a large chested lady bouncing her breasts

What are the chances?

 

[Kite159]

It wouldn't be as bad if it was just normal photos rather than GIF style clips, at least those don't use up as much data

 

[DM352]

I just got "These Walmart Photos Are Not For Everyone—#11 Is Too MuchStars Are Made" on this forum. Yesterday, it was 150 free spins with an online casino.

I did not click on either.


The funniest clickbait ones I get are with the BBC news abroad:
- a picture of a couple happy they did a Canadian reverse mortgage. The picture is them standing in front of a brick bungelow somewhere like Littlehampton.
- picture with "these cars are priced cents in the dollar". I look closely and they are UK plated rhd newish cars which would be banned here by Transport Canada being less than 15 years old to import.
https://trace.mediago.io/ju/ic?tn=4...WO3UNLQ&client=ca-pub-0423981136367513&adurl=

 

[skyhigh]

What are the chances?

And just now:
A potentially underage, certainly fairly young girl... Not a good look for a family friendly forum...

 

[Kite159]

And just now:View attachment 191661
A potentially underage, certainly fairly young girl... Not a good look for a family friendly forum...

Indeed, the sort of image which might give the wrong impression if someone is reading the forum when in public (ie when using a train where someone might get overlooked even by accident).

Tonight it seems it's mainly the "'Celebrity' doctors confirm that..." Style with the odd 'her bikini photos' thrown in for good measure

 

[najaB]

Worth noting that the forum administrators have very limited control of exactly which ads are served up by the ad companies.

A potentially underage, certainly fairly young girl... Not a good look for a family friendly forum...

If there are any specific ads that you find objectionable, there's usually a 'Report' or 'Block' link hidden somewhere in a corner of each ad.

 

[greatkingrat]

The grammar is bad too! Should either be "Amish Woman Leaves" or "Amish Women Leave".

 

[Floss63]

I find those click bait ads really uncomfortable - perhaps more so because I'm female. I'm posting this using my laptop where I can only see genuine ads, mostly for online stores and websites I frequently use - although one for dog food has just appeared and I don't own one! The dodgy ones seem to pop up when I access the forum on my phone.

 

[Tetchytyke]

Worth noting that the forum administrators have very limited control of exactly which ads are served up by the ad companies.

If there are any specific ads that you find objectionable, there's usually a 'Report' or 'Block' link hidden somewhere in a corner of each ad.

Google serve the adverts. They are useless at responding to any sort of report. They simply don't care.

Unless and until the law is changed to make the advertiser financially responsible for any fraud arising from their advert, nothing will change.

 

[skyhigh]

If there are any specific ads that you find objectionable, there's usually a 'Report' or 'Block' link hidden somewhere in a corner of each ad.

Yes, but especially on mobile I'm not going to try and click on a tiny report button that's deliberately made hard to use, as it's likely I'll just end up clicking on the dodgy ad itself.

 

[Mike395]

Just to confirm - Google serves the adverts and we have very limited control over the content unfortunately!

That being said, this recent surge of dodgy ads all seems to come from the same publisher. I've blocked this publisher wholesale at our end so hopefully the examples above (and similar) won't reoccur

 

[pdeaves]

Isn't the choice of advert displayed influenced by whatever else the user has been looking at online? If that's the case, there's a potential obvious solution...

 

[Shimbleshanks]

Just to confirm - Google serves the adverts and we have very limited control over the content unfortunately!

That being said, this recent surge of dodgy ads all seems to come from the same publisher. I've blocked this publisher wholesale at our end so hopefully the examples above (and similar) won't reoccur

I was quite enjoying them...

 

[Tetchytyke]

Isn't the choice of advert displayed influenced by whatever else the user has been looking at online? If that's the case, there's a potential obvious solution...

It shouldn't if you have opted out of personalised advertising.

 

[styles]

Isn't the choice of advert displayed influenced by whatever else the user has been looking at online? If that's the case, there's a potential obvious solution...

Dunno what you lot are looking at but I'm getting adverts for Radisson (booked one yesterday) and Jet2 (was looking at an easy package holiday for next year some time last week)

 

[Mike395]

It shouldn't if you have opted out of personalised advertising.

Correct - and perhaps unsurprisingly, those who opt out get more adverts they might perceive as junk....

 

[172007]

Temu adverts are pretty close to click bait adverts with scantily dressed people or people wearing clothes making them look like they are not, amongst other weird items.

 

[styles]

Temu adverts are pretty close to click bait adverts with scantily dressed people or people wearing clothes making them look like they are not, amongst other weird items.

Before Temu, there used to be another sort of 'sells every and all sort of crap from China' website that I can't remember the name of now. In 2016/2017 though I remember having a things with a colleague, and every morning we'd send screenshots of the weirdest crap we'd seen advertised on this platform. Maybe it was Wish, but maybe it was another.

Anyway, my point is, I was getting adverts for this dodgy Temu-like stuff probably a decade ago. Shewees, blow up dolls, tactical combat boots, gloves with bluetooth mic/speakers in them, all sorts. It's almost strange we haven't moved on.

 

[bleeder4]

I must admit, I thought everyone used ad blockers these days. I see zero ads whatsoever on the vast majority of websites, courtesy of my ad blocker.

 

[brad465]

This site is one of the better ones, but adverts have massively gone downhill in recent years, probably due to a combination of AI, "the algorithm",ndesperation for products to sell (a sign the consumerism model is struggling), deregulation/lack of enforcement of online content and of certain products, and more content creators existing who are reliant on advertising revenue.

 

[GusB]

I must admit, I thought everyone used ad blockers these days. I see zero ads whatsoever on the vast majority of websites, courtesy of my ad blocker.

I certainly do use one, but I disable it on sites like this one because I know how important the ad revenue is.

I've had no issue with ads here until recently. Since that publisher was recently blocked, I'm just seeing normal adverts. Having said that, I haven't blocked personalised ads and I'm currently seeing on for On the Market - not relevant to me at all!

 

[najaB]

I must admit, I thought everyone used ad blockers these days. I see zero ads whatsoever on the vast majority of websites, courtesy of my ad blocker.

I don't.

Websites cost money to run and if banner ads that I largely ignore are the price I have to pay to get services that I'm actually interested in for free, then it's value for money.

 

[357]

I must admit, I thought everyone used ad blockers these days. I see zero ads whatsoever on the vast majority of websites, courtesy of my ad blocker.

I use PiHole and unblock various websites that (a) I want to support and (b) don't serve annoying, irritating or excessive amounts of ads

 

[Kite159]

Certainly a lot better this evening, mostly the adverts are the "Discover more" with a list of random words, like forum.

 

[styles]

I must admit, I had to disable uBlock Origin to get those ads to display.

I mainly use extensions like uBlock because some ads are frankly too intrusive.

See my example in this post, for a flavour: https://www.railforums.co.uk/thread...hat-irritate-you.219994/page-260#post-7370709

And that's before we get onto popups and interfering with back/forwards buttons and tracking my cursor leaving the content window etc.

Many websites, including I would say almost every local news website, have become barely navigable without ad blockers or script blockers, so I see why many people use them.

I will add an exception for this site though.

 

[DelW]

Just to confirm - Google serves the adverts and we have very limited control over the content unfortunately!

That being said, this recent surge of dodgy ads all seems to come from the same publisher. I've blocked this publisher wholesale at our end so hopefully the examples above (and similar) won't reoccur

That's good! I appreciate that the advertising revenue funds the forum, and the great majority of ads on here aren't intrusive, but some of those recent ones were inappropriate and verging on pornographic.

 

[Mike395]

Can I just quickly check in and make sure nothing else inappropriate has resurfaced since?

 

[Floss63]

I haven't seen anything dodgy since you sorted it last week. Thank you very much.