For a Forum that wants to keep politics and the resultant name calling away, why am I getting ads that have political conflict as their primary draw?
Combination of Adblock and uBlock Origin keeps things pretty clean except for the Grand Canyon pop-up
Works fine for me. No political ads in sight.
Karma?
(Sorry, I couldn’t resist…) [:)]
Seriously, if you look at the ‘trade press about the trade press’ you will see all the ways Kalmbach Media is taking up motivating and using its enthusiast communities. Some of them specifically involve forum participants who aren’t registered subscribers (that would show up in the usual direct-mail subscriber databases. They have ‘teamed up’ with a company that claims to know all about how to do that sort of thing.
In the past, there have been several occasions where ‘marketing partners’ have provided malformed content that has broken access to the forums, locked up sessions or browsers, or fed decidedly unusual content to particular users. The particular issue I have with the recent approach (since the last major ‘renovation’ a few weeks ago) is that it provides the users with little if any control over the content of the ads it serves, particularly in the ability to reject any particular ad or type of ad (as Google, for example, nominally does).
A problem is that each of these little joint venture partner companies zealously treasures its little algorithms for targeting the unwilling ‘clients’ and therefore is highly unlikely to reveal how it actually selects the ads you’ll be served. It will likely target your ‘clickstream’ whether or not something you clicked was something you actually wanted to see, and then not give you the option to edit or even weight the “results” of its “research”. (It may also look across other activity or files to ‘determine your interests’ or some other excuse for outright snooping…)</
I get no ads at all. Just lucky, I guess.
I hink the ad Balt saw (and I saw it, too) had to do with refinancing mortgages. I found it on the Newswire, and the heading was definitely politically slanted, in my opinion. Since Google, not Kalmbach, provided it, I’m not sure there is much that can be done.
Kalmbach can stop running Google ads and complain to Google about the advertising that is being shown on Kalmbach sites.
I added a “hosts” file on my computer. While it probably needs an update, it keeps a lot of advertising off pages I visit. And I don’t have to worry about the ad blockers being malware themselves.
Adblock keeps the ads away for me. And if Adblock gets thwarted by aggesssive forcing on a particular site, I will simply stay away from said site.
FWIW, all of the ads showing up on the page while typing this are either full size or model railroad related. I have had experiences in the past where the ads were in no way related to the content of this site.
Amusing note about ad blockers: I’m running the most recent release of Firefox with the privacy settings set to standard and a fair number of sites are claiming that I’m running an ad-blocker.
I havent seen any political ads pop up at all.
I have some women’s fashion ads pop up. I’m not complaining.
Oh baby…[;)]
This is not women’s fashion - young or old.
You must love the “meet local singles” ads that I keep seeing on Railpictures.net!
Let’s put it this way 'Dude, I find them interesting…
Fear not everyone, I have NO interest in misbehaving!
Too old for that stuff anyway.
Wayne, if you misbehaved, you might be in a firestorm worse than those in California?[:)]
You ain’t kiddin’ Johnny!
Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, and California all rolled into one!
Wayne
I recently had some “website teething problems”… I wound up stripping some what i HAD CONSIDERED HELPFUL ‘web-stuff’ off my machine. Replaced it with some updated versions… Firefox and some adjunct ad blocking websites. That settled down my problems and and complaints which had appeared after one of Klambake’s ‘week-end upgrades’. Not so helpful; to appaently eveyone, but the IT Gremlins.
Wasn’t the first time they[|(] wreaked havoc among Forum users…but probably not the last! [:-^] After all, I guess, it is to be expected when there is no direct charge to users. [sigh][sigh][sigh]
[:-^] [banghead]
I almost hate to mention this … but did you check your private messages lately?
To my knowledge the forum software won’t let you send a PM from Firefox above 61: everything opens but the text entry window gets ‘updated’ right at the last minute so it doesn’t take any entry from the mouse or keyboard.
So be prepared to keep a browser that does work ready at hand if you want to reply to any private message or post one yourself…
I’m firmly convinced that the software vendors track which features are most used and take those features out in new versions (or at least make them difficult to use). It sure seems that way to me, anyhow…
Thanks, Overmod ! I had re-discovered that problem, shortly after I had re-installed Firefox’s latest version… I had had a similar note from Flintlock76 about that same issue**.** He uses Google.
My personal preference is just about anythig else. Google is not way up on my personal favorites. Neither is M/S Edge and its iterations. I use the Edge when I am going to read or write messages. It is easily dumped when I’m done; Google, not so much. I guess, I may be somewhat paranoid, but Google seems to be the equivalent of inviting the Gossipy Neighbor in, along with their tape recorder.[banghead]