Questionable ads on the forum?

[mirthmgr]

I'm not sure how much control you have over what ads are displayed on the forum, but I've been encountering some recently that are more than a little shady. It's not the content of any of the ads that show up on the page, it's that there appear to be quite a few that automatically redirect to a different site without any user interaction; if I leave a tab open, there's a chance that I will return to that tab to see an obvious scam ("You've won a cruise!" or "OMG you has virus! Click here now or your computer explode!") instead of the MillRight forum. I've done extensive virus/malware scanning on my system just to be sure that it wasn't on my end, but that all came up clear and I haven't encountered it on any other site.

I've got my adblocker disabled here to try to support the company (I don't know if MillRight gets a cut or it just goes to ProBoards), so I can solve it on my end if need be, but wanted to bring up the issue to see if there were some advertising settings you might be able to tweak to weed out some of the bad actors.

Fyi, I'm running Chrome on Win 10 (not that it would make a difference on your end, but just in case). I'm actually surprised that Chrome has allowed these redirects; I would have thought that it would flag them as potentially malicious and halt their scripts.

Thanks!

[Derek the Admin]

Thanks for reporting this. We actually have no control whatsoever on the ads. It's all proboards but it's usually based on recent searches. That part is over my head and I guess it doesn't always work that way (unless you've been Googling free cruises and viruses... though I'm sure you haven't).

I'll forward this on to proboards support to see if they have any input on.

I'm not seeing anything odd personally. Is anyone else seeing anything?

Thanks again for the heads up.

[mirthmgr]

No problem! I don't think I've been searching for anything too crazy (unless the cat's been up to no good online while I'm away), and most of the ads are actually quite relevant to me (I see Adafruit and Rockler a whole lot). Exploits pop up and get patched all the time, so I'm not too worried about it. It mostly just makes me glad that my web development days are behind me!

[Derek the Admin]

Please let me know if you see anything else though.

[Bruce]

I've noticed a few weird re-directs of web pages, may have even been malware of some sort, but it has been a couple months back since I had any issues.