Ffr rant. Banners. Advertisements. Wtf. Dx

[MDMAngel]

Originally Posted by Kagami_Hiiragi

oh my god!
i went and clicked the dance genre the other day and i got a link to a pornography site.
>

every once in a while, I get an ad that has something to do with interacting with people online, and was promoting "doing what you always wanted to do but couldn't"

Which definitely referred to something sexual to the, non-pornographic, but still sexual, picture.

[bender5]

I'm glad Maldon has come in here to clear things up. Because people do take so many things for granted.

Things like the average miss fix when Xelius put in a lot of time to fix the coding, so that would happen. No one appreciates the volunteer work that is put into ffr, they just expect handouts and luxuries because that's where it started. Back in 03-05 there was hardly a huge member base, hardly a huge stress on the servers, and hardly anything that really needed to be produced and made into a commercial product like ffr is becoming now.

Sure there are quite a few things that are on ffr now that I wish there weren't, but I subscribe because I like to support ffr in the things that they do for us. People take even the forum for granted, which doesn't take up much resource is still an essential part of the site.

I love almost every aspect of ffr, the community here is much better than many forums you can go out and find on the internet, and if it means that for $38 a year I have to put a little money into the pockets of the people that are putting in their time and effort to make things better for me, then so be it.

[MalDON]

Hey everyone,

If this happens to you (redirects, bad banner image etc) send me a pm with as much detail as you can. A screenshot wont really help. I need a physical url for the banner, or if you are snazzy with tech, find out the code the ad put into the page. I'm trying to track down exactly where these ads are being served from so I can pass it to synth to get them blocked.

[pokelda]

how do you get a physical url for flash ads

[sumzup]

I don't think it's possible...

[MalDON]

You can get urls for flash ads. Download firebug for firefox, then use the inspect tool, hover over the ad and it will show you the html where the ad is. You should be able to get the swf that way.

Edit: Tokzic's posts (and one of mine) were deleted because now is not the time to argue over how the site is being run.

[pokelda]

no i meant GET RID OF THEM

[Patricoo]

I will say this about ads on this site. They are terrible. (I haven't read the "argument" between tokzic's posts and MalDONs because apparently the whole things was deleted before I could read it, if you guys went over this I'm sorry.)

Why are the ads terrible? Because they don't target the audience here at all.

The only ad I've seen on FFR related to the playerbase was one for a samurai warrior game, (of which I played for two days to great disappointment. Yes, I clicked on it multiple times.) Ads do work on here, but there are things on this site trying to direct a base of mostly 14-17 year olds to buying wallets, financing, AOL.com, getting degrees online, buying cars, and even pottery barn. I don't know what FFR uses to gather it's advertising cash, but I'm willing to guess that it's a generic "automatic" system where a computer decides based on bidding and statistics, and not a "billboard for hire" system where an actual human discerns what is the best material to advertise.

Someone with a brain should be deciding who advertises when. Right now I hardly see anything here that tries to appeal to my demographic.

[MalDON]

Originally Posted by Patricoo

I will say this about ads on this site. They are terrible. (I haven't read the "argument" between tokzic's posts and MalDONs because apparently the whole things was deleted before I could read it, if you guys went over this I'm sorry.)

Why are the ads terrible? Because they don't target the audience here at all.

The only ad I've seen on FFR related to the playerbase was one for a samurai warrior game, (of which I played for two days to great disappointment. Yes, I clicked on it multiple times.) Ads do work on here, but there are things on this site trying to direct a base of mostly 14-17 year olds to buying wallets, financing, AOL.com, getting degrees online, buying cars, and even pottery barn. I don't know what FFR uses to gather it's advertising cash, but I'm willing to guess that it's a generic "automatic" system where a computer decides based on bidding and statistics, and not a "billboard for hire" system where an actual human discerns what is the best material to advertise.

Someone with a brain should be deciding who advertises when. Right now I hardly see anything here that tries to appeal to my demographic.

That's almost entirely up to the advertisement companies. Many of those ads are fillers when there are no targetable ads available.

[marth1992]

yea ive started seeing these adds too (this time its male enhancement =/ ), and i always thought google adds were related to the content on the site, i remember a while back, every single ad was for servers due to that post at the bottom of ffr

[Patricoo]

Originally Posted by MalDON

That's almost entirely up to the advertisement companies. Many of those ads are fillers when there are no targetable ads available.

Advertising companies? FFR is owned by one of the admins here right? (Synth?) Not a domain hoster I thought. The owner/person in charge of adspace should be approving the ads that run here or actively searching for places that would pay good cash to reach a 15-17 group that can score thousands of hits an hour.

Like I said, why are we using an ad service program? It just doesn't make any sense, especially considering how specific of a demographic we are. It sounds like someone thought this would be easy, but is losing potential cash because "easy" turned into "lazy."

[sumzup]

It's much easier to contract to an advertiser that deals with hundreds of companies instead of making arrangements with those companies on a one-on-one basis.

[Patricoo]

Of course. But at the cost of effort is the cost of cash. I have AOL at the top of my screen. A few reloads ago there was one for women's dieting and dating tips.

Seriously? You think that contractor dished out top dollar to FFR for that?

[MalDON]

Everyone uses advertisement management services. Unfortunately, the one we use decided to turn bad. Myspace uses the same service we use. And there's reports of myspace getting ad redirects as well.

Let me re-iterate this:

None of the ads shown are moderated by FFR. It is the responsibility of the ad providing service to ensure that the ads are clean and malicious code free.

[Kiyofoxx]

As I said when i posted this; I just feel it's wrong with the kinds of ads, and how they are popping up. It started about 5 days ago and its really driving me crazy.
They just do it randomly too; I was writing a PM to a friend and I had typed about 5 and a half lengthy paragraphs, and then the page redirected me to this "blinxy" site which has cartoon dolls with heads the size of toilets. I had to write it again. Apart from the annoyance of writing it out again, it just shouldnt happen.

Theres about four kinds of advertisements I keep getting which seem to be Male enlargement, adult fun, blinxy (or whatever it is), and a video of a nerd on about some random dyson.

[Kiyofoxx]

Something to add on;
After just posting that last reply I was redirected to it. again.

[MalDON]

Originally Posted by Kiyofoxx

Something to add on;
After just posting that last reply I was redirected to it. again.

Ans why don't I have a pm with the address it redirected you to? We can't fix this unless you guys help out. I can't sit here logged out refreshing the page until I get one. I simply don't have the time. Much easier to have you guys pm me when it happens.

[Kiyofoxx]

http://www.blinkx.com/ac/cb?adid=02-100-201-300-404

There you go.
The URL keeps changing. The numbers change.

[Shadowcliff]

Now here is an example of an ad with relevance; one that better targets FFR's audience.

I got this one when I refreshed, at the bottom of this very page.
I think they would get more clicks than, say, chubby gay dating.

[xingyguy]

Use noscript.