Advertising controls?

Are there any advertising controls on the forums?

Screenshot edited by me to obscure objectionable content.

Yeah, I’d like to know too!

I believe this is supposed to be a ‘family friendly’ sort of place, not exactly the sort of thing you want cropping up here.

-El

Suggestive ‘boudoir’ photography pushed to me, most recently about half an hour ago.

who monitors ads anyhow and can the website really control the ads or is that the ad company who needs to control these things cause im seeing them too now that you say something.

also why isnt it all ads to work for amtrack or up or something or ads for bachmann or proto or whoever seriously its called marketing know your customers a bunch of train guys on A fourm about trains is not going to be intrested in naked people when their talking trains with their buddys

I have an ad blocker and don’t get any. It’s free.

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Take a look at MalwareBytes, It’s free and also acts as a firewall against trackers.

Maybe it’s time to report to the FTC and put Firecrown on notice for allowing this content on a non age restricted site. Funny how they were all gung ho when they brought the forums on-line, now it’s all chirp, chirp, chirp

Maybe its time we take care of ourselves and learn to put free Adblock or other adblocking on our computers. I never receive the ads. I don’t see how you suggest to report to the FTC and put Firecrown on notice when it appears that you do not want to control your own decisions for your viewing pleasure on a site that offers free dialog and train interactions with other members. I personally thank Firecrown for reviving this website into something better then before.

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I agree that threatening Firecrown is a very wrong approach.

I don’t use an ad-blocker because part of the forum cost is defrayed by the advertising, so I think it is unfair to install a full ad-blocker. On the other hand, I put up with considerable content meddling by Kalmbach because they claimed to be trying to have a ‘family-friendly site’ only to be streamed malformed ads, and dubious content – there were threads about this back in the day, and the (frankly pathetic) story we were told was that the ads were served externally and there was nothing Kalmbach could do about that. (This in spite of all the hand-rubbing Kalmbach Media did in 2018 and 2019 in the trade press about the ways they planned to monetize the enthusiast community…)

There are surely companies among the thousands that serve ‘targeted content’ that provide filters – even if they are crude ‘adult content’ filters that exclude some content that some forum users might have wanted to see.

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Hang on now - don’t speak for all of us.

I don’t know how certain ads are displayed. I live in Japan and see ads for Japanese real estate and adult comics. It’s normal, so I don’t mind.

I understand Zug, speaking for all, is a dangerous statement. With the idea (fact) one can not get something for nothing, How can Firecrown offer such a great website with out some ROI. That said.

Can someone comment:
If one who finds offensive advertising gets an ad blocker, does this affect the Firecrown ad revenue stream? i.e. can ad blockers be detected? comment? regards mike endmrw0509251344

Yes it would, but if they don’t want to control the ads being shown on their site, then so be it. Again remember when they said the ads were coming back and they made a big deal about how those kind of ads would be eliminated.

FYI, I do take care of myself, I do use an adblocker Herr Besserwisser

It generally seems like most methods of serving ads don’t really do any sort of screening of advertisements- they simply serve whatever people pay them to serve. The question is always if they actually have any kind of control over who sees what or if it’s all decided by a mysterious algorithm that nobody is allowed/able to look inside of.

I got used to seeing ‘adult’ ads pop up on the websites all over when I was a kid, I just ignored them. If a website doesn’t want to be associated with this sort of advertisement, I would think there are, theoretically, ways to achieve that. But it might depend on who serves the ads, and how much they care about asserting any control over who is served what ads, beyond trying to serve ads that their algorithm “thinks” will be more likely to successfully promote goods or services to a consumer, based off of data it can gather about what a user is interested in. I imagine, if it knows nothing about your interests, it’s going to guess wildly.

-El

Definitely jarring seeming some of them pop up.