Weird little pop-up thing (ad?) at the bottom of the forum pages?

[engledogg]

Hi,

Whenever I visit one of the main forum pages (https://www.allspark.com/home/forums/, https://www.allspark.com/home/forums/politics-and-religion/, etc.), I keep getting this at the bottom of the page:

or

It can appear either on the left or right - it's a clickable link (I didn't click on it since I'm not sure where it would take me)...is it just some type of ad or something?

It doesn't seem to happen on individual topic pages (https://www.allspark.com/home/threads/the-new-transformers-deal-thread.2486/)

I don't get it in Incognito mode (I'm using Chrome as my browser).

Oh, it's happening in Edge, as well.

This seems to be a recent development as I don't remember this happening until today.

MIKE
engledogg

 

[The Predaking]

I haven't seen that yet.

 

[The Predaking]

Actually, I have seen it now that you mention it. It put it in one of my posts:

The Gun Thread

Sorry, the company I work for is Titan Protection. As you can see, I've got the all black. The missus has the compact model in silver. Takes 15 round mags instead of 17 but it's an easy swap if she wants to use extended. They are very nice guns, shoot well. And seriously, the weight. If...

www.allspark.com

 

[Kalidor]

Screenshots please

 

[LiamA]

OK, now we're getting ads inside posts. The kind where it turns some words into fake links and clicking them pops up an ad. Is that intentional?

What the hell?

 

[The Predaking]

Screenshots please

 

[Kalidor]

Yeah that/s a thing it's doing. It's not harmful but I'll look into it

 

[The Predaking]

It is even in the forum titles.

 

[Kalidor]

Interesting. What happens if you click on them? I don't want them to 'trick' people. Just need to nail down which setting they go with

 

[LiamA]

I just tried one. An ad opens on the side of the screen. It is a Google Ad.

 

[Kalidor]

Weird. In the grand scheme of things clicking ads DOES help a little, but obviously I don't want it to be super intrusive.

 

[Pocket]

Oh, and now we're just straight-up getting actual banner ads inside posts.

<iframe> was a mistake.

 

[Kalidor]

Screenshots please

 

[The Predaking]

I haven't seen that yet.

 

[Kalidor]

I've also been fighting to block all that bot traffic. It seems to be getting better with the little tweaks here and there.

 

[Ultra Magnus13]

 

[The Predaking]

Now I see it. This is from the celebrity death thread:

 

[LiamA]

Here's some more.

 

[Kalidor]

Woah! Okay, that's a little much

 

[Kalidor]

Those weird multiple banners in posts should be going away

 

[CoffeeHorse]

All good on desktop Firefox.