What's Going On?

This past week or so I have noticed MANY site that are now filled with underlined words that when you happen to scroll over them they pop up with annoying ads. I'm seeing these blasted things every where, even here, and I also noticed them on Puppy Find, one of my regular advertising places. Even my own page on Puppy find where I go to edit and update my ads has these crazy things. I'm seeing them on practicly every site I go to now. I find them really irritating, especially when they pop up with only a quick pass of your mouse cursor. They block the information you are trying to read, and sometimes are hard to get rid of. Are people who own the sites getting paid for clicks on these things? What's the deal?

Some of those sites might put up annoying and unwanted advertising links, and get paid on a "pay-per-click" basis, but if you are seeing it on a huge number of websites, and on sites that did not show these links before, you might be infested with a virus or spyware, or both.

 

Best thing would be to do an antivirus scan (obviously with your antivirus program updated to the latest definitions), and you can also do a spywarescan with (free) programs such as Spybot Search & Destroy or Adaware. Just type the names into Google if you do not have them and you will soon be sent to the right place.

 

By the way, may I wish you a very posperous new year?

Edited January 1, 2013 by mrdee (see edit history)

Actually popup ads are getting more and more popular and this really annoys me, i think a new era of popup blocking by web browsers should start to stop these popups. i don't like to get 3 or 4 pages in front of my face including lots of ads that even are not related to the article i'm reading. firefox & chrome are still very powerful in this aspect but these days i see that they fail lots of times.Now i have searched a little to see why people are going to use popup ads and i found quite interesting information, because most of users are now using one of these browsers : Firefox & Crhome, so webmasters have found that if users use AdBlock plus addone will be able to skip all ads and this is not good at all for a webmaster which wants to make money, so they found that popup are not blocked correctly in most of browsers and they changed their method, as you know many websites use popup to show next page you want to see when you click on the links so if a browser blocks all methods of popping up a page you can not use some of websites correctly , now i see that firefox opens some popups and then closes them itself ! which is a little weird to me but it happens to me a lot during this month and i think they have found a way to keep those popups away from us. I think an addone with capability of seeing what is on the popup page should be able to block ads and i again think that soon we will see these type of ad blockers.@Sheepdog : i found that popup ads are very expensive ! searched a little on the net and found that if a banner of size 120x120 pixels cost you 30$ on a website then a popup ad on that website will cost you around 150$ which is 5 times more. all the things webmasters get by a popup ad is traffic, they doesn't care that this traffic is going to buy anything from their website or not they just want a visitor ip so they put their whole website on the popup to get more visitors. so by making a webstie and spending money on popup ads they get good ranks in Alexa and after that they sell their website and make money by this job.@mrdee : i even guessed that i'm infected so i updated my antivirus and ran a full scan then downloaded some anti spyware stuffs and again scanned my system but there was not any virus or spyware in my computer, the fact is that these popups are growing very fast and i'm afraid of the day you open google and click on search button and get a popup !again i think we need google hands here to solve this problem, they can easily get us rid of all these popups by just changing their SEO method to something against popups (which they don't have right now). people who are using popup ads mostly want to get better ranks in google and alexa , so if popup gets their rank ruined they will stop using popup ads and again we can live peacefully on the net.

Try using Firefox Web Browser with the Adblock Add-on.Those underlined words might be Kontera Ads. (google it)Xisto used them for a period of time and as a member here, you were able to capitalize on them to earn money.

There are about three possible things that could have the website with those underlined words advertisements. It could be advertisements that the web master put up there intentionally to make some money, firstly. If that is the case, you can probably use an ad blocker to make them go away, though the web master would not be too pleased if you have been the one who has been click on all of the advertisements. Secondly, it could be a toolbar or adware or browser plugin or something that is installed on the computer, in which case you want to try disabling all of the browser plugins, running in safe mode, and check if all of those advertisements still come up. Also check if you have a network proxy or if your Internet Service Provider hands out free connections in exchange for advertising. If you have a free privacy proxy, that could be it because when something is free, that's reason enough to suspect that there could be advertising involved. Since you have already checked out for viruses, there could still be some adware that antivirus software does not classify as malware just yet. Finally, you could simply be running into a cross-site scripting thing where somebody manages to hijack a website to run advertisements in the hope of making some extra cash but without taking in the effort to build a viewership and ethically get advertising revenue from users to their own websites but instead has to steal somebody else's wind and ruin things for other users.

This past week or so I have noticed MANY site that are now filled with underlined words that when you happen to scroll over them they pop up with annoying ads. I'm seeing these blasted things every where, even here, and I also noticed them on Puppy Find, one of my regular advertising places. Even my own page on Puppy find where I go to edit and update my ads has these crazy things. I'm seeing them on practicly every site I go to now. I find them really irritating, especially when they pop up with only a quick pass of your mouse cursor. They block the information you are trying to read, and sometimes are hard to get rid of. Are people who own the sites getting paid for clicks on these things? What's the deal?

To answer this question, they are new networks that "don't annoy visitors." Whether you find them annoying or not is really up to each person, but some like them more since they are more related to the topic and aren't flashy banners. Others dislike them because they seem like real links but aren't.

Actually, this site uses (or used) them in the past for visitors that weren't registered/logged in.

Interesting. So it could actually be my computer and not the world in general? Tell me, do any of you others see in my original post any underlined words? Because when I look at it the words "my own page" are highlighted in blue and I get a box that advertises a web site builder and a free domain name ad.

Interesting. So it could actually be my computer and not the world in general? Tell me, do any of you others see in my original post any underlined words? Because when I look at it the words "my own page" are highlighted in blue and I get a box that advertises a web site builder and a free domain name ad.

That's definitely odd, and would probably be an addon or something you have in your browser, rather than this site. Addons can change information on-the-fly so they could be implementing their own ad network into every page (or most pages) you visit.

The words "my own page" are not a link for me in your original post to this thread, so it is probably something that you are running on your computer or something on the network that you are connected to. Some free Internet hotspots are advertising sponsored, and work with advertisements being added through links to content. Then, there are proxy servers that do just the same. If you have a free toolbar or something added onto your browser or running on your computer, that could be inserting the advertisements too. I remember seeing a dictionary plugin for web browsers that would turn a word-selection into a dictionary query on a library computer.

Weired. Very weird. I am now on my sisterinlaws computer and the links have dissapeared. I haven't deliberatly downloaded any new tool bars, but almost accidentally loaded one with a game I was playing on Face Book. I wonder if it managed to get something on my computer before I exed it out? It's going to be hard for me to find out what it is on there, I can look at my program lists and never really know what junk I need to remove and what a needed programs. But I do think this is very likely now the root of the problem.

I dug threw all the things in my program list to see if something had been added, but couldn't find anything, granted, there is a lot in there I really don't have a clue as to what it is. What's even weirder, is now I'm not seeing the links I saw earlier when I made this post. I really didn't change anything. Mrdee, good tip on spy bot. I used to have it in my previous computers, but never got around to putting it in this one.

I dug threw all the things in my program list to see if something had been added, but couldn't find anything, granted, there is a lot in there I really don't have a clue as to what it is. What's even weirder, is now I'm not seeing the links I saw earlier when I made this post. I really didn't change anything.
Mrdee, good tip on spy bot. I used to have it in my previous computers, but never got around to putting it in this one.

Does the forum look the same now as it did when you saw the links? When I am logged out or on the "light" version of the site I see the linked keywords in posts.