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Post by Hoovie on Apr 11, 2019 22:54:50 GMT
I would like to apologise to Club Supporters who are probably currently seeing Adverts on the forum, which as Supporters they should not see.
We have an upgrade option in place that eliminates adverts upto a certain number of page views show to forum members in total and the upgrade bought covers the usual volume of page views to cancel out the adverts.
However, the last three days has had an unprecedented increase in page counts - over 300 times the usual per day! To put that into context, the "no advert" upgrade we pay for to cover the month would in those three days would have covered around 3 HOURS!
Until I am able to check what has happened, I cannot re-instate the Advert-free upgrade as if this page view count glitch stays at the same volume it would cost around £1,000 PER MONTH to ensure no adverts while this is being looked at.
Please beat with me while I understad what has happened.
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Post by jasehutch on Apr 12, 2019 6:30:15 GMT
I really don't consider it an issue Hoovie.. :TU:
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Post by philip42h on Apr 12, 2019 7:28:07 GMT
Can you say when you took down the Ad-free upgrade?
Over the past few days, I have got the impression that our hosting service is running a campaign against the use of ad-blockers - I've been getting banner ads and pop-ups from the bottom of the page requesting that I disable AdBlockPlus. (So I've been adding those elements to the block list ... )
Either way, I noticed that it was saying we were hosted by the free version of their hosting service - which puzzled me ... is that correct?
As an side, I also noticed that the ad-blocker also appeared to be blocking the page view count table ...
Anyhow, everything looks back to normal this morning - I don't see ads whether or not I have ad blocking enabled ... ?
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Post by davidwilson on Apr 12, 2019 7:47:18 GMT
I have not noticed but not to worry!
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Post by Hoovie on Apr 12, 2019 11:11:51 GMT
Can you say when you took down the Ad-free upgrade? Over the past few days, I have got the impression that our hosting service is running a campaign against the use of ad-blockers - I've been getting banner ads and pop-ups from the bottom of the page requesting that I disable AdBlockPlus. (So I've been adding those elements to the block list ... ) Either way, I noticed that it was saying we were hosted by the free version of their hosting service - which puzzled me ... is that correct? As an side, I also noticed that the ad-blocker also appeared to be blocking the page view count table ... Anyhow, everything looks back to normal this morning - I don't see ads whether or not I have ad blocking enabled ... ? It was around 4 days ago we had a sudden spike in view. I didn't actually take down/disable the ad-free upgrade - it just suddenly ran out of the allocated allowance of the ad-free page views, after which time the forum reverts to the Paid-by-advertising mode which is also the shown as the "free" version. I wouldn't be surprised if the host has "anti ad-blocker" detection running - after all, that is how they fund their service on the "Free" service. You won't have seem that before as we have always had the paid-for service until this glitch happened - and when the service is paid for, they don't care about Ad blockers as that is down to the Forum Owner to decide to allow Adverts or not. You shouldn't need to run any ad-blockers on this forum as a Club Supporter. It is quite possible they (ad-blockers) will screw up other JS script addons so you will be blocking some forum features that are nothing to do with adverts. We should be back to normal I hope, yes. As soon as I noticed this last night, I logged a message on the Proboards Support Forum and very shortly after that, an "anonymous" person from Proboards bought a fresh batch of ad-free views for the forum to reinstate that service, so they both acknowleged the message I posted and provided a very fast resolution to deal with the immediate situation (being served Adverts wrongly, that is), so 10/10 to them as good hosts there (if this was still tapatalk, we would be waiting months probably!). I need to check for an update, but probably a one-off situation. Cheers. |
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Post by philip42h on Apr 12, 2019 11:50:45 GMT
Can you say when you took down the Ad-free upgrade? Over the past few days, I have got the impression that our hosting service is running a campaign against the use of ad-blockers - I've been getting banner ads and pop-ups from the bottom of the page requesting that I disable AdBlockPlus. (So I've been adding those elements to the block list ... ) Either way, I noticed that it was saying we were hosted by the free version of their hosting service - which puzzled me ... is that correct? As an side, I also noticed that the ad-blocker also appeared to be blocking the page view count table ... Anyhow, everything looks back to normal this morning - I don't see ads whether or not I have ad blocking enabled ... ? It was around 4 days ago we had a sudden spike in view. I didn't actually take down/disable the ad-free upgrade - it just suddenly ran out of the allocated allowance of the ad-free page views, after which time the forum reverts to the Paid-by-advertising mode which is also the shown as the "free" version. I wouldn't be surprised if the host has "anti ad-blocker" detection running - after all, that is how they fund their service on the "Free" service. You won't have seem that before as we have always had the paid-for service until this glitch happened - and when the service is paid for, they don't care about Ad blockers as that is down to the Forum Owner to decide to allow Adverts or not. You shouldn't need to run any ad-blockers on this forum as a Club Supporter. It is quite possible they (ad-blockers) will screw up other JS script addons so you will be blocking some forum features that are nothing to do with adverts. We should be back to normal I hope, yes. As soon as I noticed this last night, I logged a message on the Proboards Support Forum and very shortly after that, an "anonymous" person from Proboards bought a fresh batch of ad-free views for the forum to reinstate that service, so they both acknowleged the message I posted and provided a very fast resolution to deal with the immediate situation (being served Adverts wrongly, that is), so 10/10 to them as good hosts there (if this was still tapatalk, we would be waiting months probably!). I need to check for an update, but probably a one-off situation. Cheers. Thanks for the explanation - that's both clear and coincides with what I seen / experienced recently. I run with the ad-blocker on on all sites by default. Over the past four days ProBoards have been wanting $2.99 per month from me - which was rather annoying. But today things are back to normal and, as it happens, I have ad-blocking currently 'on' on one machine and 'off' on the other - both are working just fine. As you say, there is absolutely no need to ad-block on this forum.  You are also correct about 'screwing-up' JS script addons (or something) that provides functionality on other sites. The one that irritates me most is Ancestry - which is very expensively paid for, insists on showing 'adverts' as well, and has a subset of functionality that simply doesn't work when the ad-blocker is running!  |
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Post by Hoovie on Apr 12, 2019 12:55:11 GMT
I know you are a technical chap so have probably done/tried the following but here are a couple of suggestions that may help ref Ancestry and similarly configured sites ....
Create your own blacklisted sites in the browser. (before ad-blockers, I used to manually add addresses such as "doubleclick.*.*" into the browser as blocked sites (doubleclick used to totally kill the responsiveness of a site before fast broadband))
Install 'privacy badger'. I use this on Firefox but I think it, and similar add-ons, are available on other browsers. This I have found can be a bit more selective in terms of blocking served adverts. It can stop some forms and popups coming up though, so it is not suitable for all sites but worth trying out. I tend to have it running by default and turn it off on some sites where it stops selected things working. It's just a click to turn on and off so easy enough to try.
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Post by Hoovie on Apr 14, 2019 18:30:17 GMT
The spike in views is being looked into further as another forum owner got a similar spike around the same days.
There was no technical fault apparent so it looks like some kind of DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) which are done to either bring down sites or try to break into sites.
Neither happened and nothing was compromised, and the last few days have been back to normal so can put this behind us, but should anyone see adverts and are a Club Supporter, please let me know.
(Note that if you are not logged on, you will be seen as a guest and so will see adverts, probably of the 'Amazon' variety.)
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