We occasionally get reports of ads that trigger antivirus warnings or infect computers that are browsing the wiki. This FAQ is an attempt to consolidate all the information about such things into one thread. Please read the below before reporting any incidents.
This thread may also be used to report ads that violate our policies in other ways, such as being too "adult" or NSFW, automatically playing audio/video, etc.
REPORTING: try to get a screenshot of the console as well as this will help identify where it's coming from.
REDIRECTS: Its very tricky to get the first URL of a redirect trigger because they are designed to hide where it came from. So you need a redirect plug-in
active while the redirect happens so you can find the first URL, not the last. Where you were directed to doesn't help track down the source.
- TV Tropes, as a site, does not contain malware. We are a text-and-image wiki; viruses and malware cannot be uploaded to or embedded in the articles. As always, however, beware of any external link that you don't recognize, since we cannot automatically screen edits or posts for malicious links.
- 99.99% of the time, any suspected malware will be related to the wiki advertising.
- TV Tropes does not directly control the ads that are displayed. We use third-party ad providers and we determine things like the size and placement.
- We instruct our providers not to serve ads that redirect your browser, take control of the screen from you, forcibly scroll your screen, play audio without being clicked on, install malware, "pop up" or "pop over" your screen, or in any other way interfere with your browsing experience.
- We have custom software designed to detect ads that do these things and automatically block them.
- Malicious entities are constantly trying to sneak ads through the providers' networks in violation of these instructions. As providers have little incentive to proactively detect and block them, it's up to websites to report these sorts of problems.
- We rely on our users to report ads that get through these measures.
- Just because you see a particular ad doesn't mean everyone else sees it. Ads are customized by the ad providers to your location (by IP address), the content of the page you're viewing, and your browsing profile, which is tracking data accumulated by third parties over the course of all your internet browsing.
- Just because you get a malware warning or infection that seems related to an ad on TV Tropes does not necessarily mean that it is caused by one of our ads. Pre-existing malware on your computer can intercept ads and replace them with malicious ones.
- Ads containing malware, obviously.
- Misbehaving ads, such as ones that load a pop-up or pop-under, redirect your browser to another page, hijack your screen or automatically scroll it.
- "Adult" or NSFW ads. Scantily clad women alone may or may not qualify, depending on context, but we want this site to be work-safe.
- Ads that automatically play audio — that is, the audio starts without you clicking on the ad first. Video ads are acceptable.
- Note: Political content is not grounds for rejecting an ad. However, an ad that contains or implies hate speech, disinformation, or outright falsehoods may be objectionable enough to be blocked.
- First and foremost, maintain current, updated antivirus software, and keep your operating system and browser up to date with all patches offered by the software vendors. This includes Adobe Flash, Java, and other rich media plug-ins. Turn on your software's automatic updates if they are not already on and act immediately when prompted to install them.
- Never click on pop-ups purporting to have detected a virus, offering to "tune up" your PC, or otherwise inducing you to click on a link that you were not expecting. Any genuine message of this nature would come from your antivirus software and not from a web page.
- Be careful clicking on external links. These are identified with a small icon next to them. Example: Google. TV Tropes does not endorse or control the content of external links and you open them at your own risk.
- Never respond to any email or web page that asks for personal or financial information, including passwords, unless you have verified its identity. No reputable company will ever ask you for your password(s), other than to log in.
- You may choose to opt out of having tracking information collected by ad providers. This does not stop malware but helps you maintain your online privacy. See here for additional information.
- TV Tropes requests that you do not use ad blocking software while visiting us, as this site depends on advertising revenue to operate. If you do run an ad blocker, please add tvtropes.org to its exception list, or consider donating to the site to have certain ads removed.
- We (or the ad provider) place a "Report advertisement" link next to most advertising frames. Clicking on this will generate an automatic report and is the best way to do so. If you cannot click on this link or do not see it, continue for more advice.
- Try to identify the source URL of the suspect ad (see below). You can also use the target URL (if you are redirected), but note that this may be intentionally obfuscated by the ad provider to hide the source.
- Identify the ad provider. Some ads have a small area that links to the ad provider's page (like Google or AOL). In other cases, you can tell from the referral URL or you can look it up in a search.
- Go to the ad provider's contact/abuse page and fill out their form. Below are some links to common providers' abuse pages:
- Scan your computer for viruses. If your antivirus software will not operate (many malicious programs attempt to disable your antivirus software), you can download a scanning tool on a known clean system and run it on your infected machine from a read-only CD-R or flash drive.
- If you suspect that you've been tricked into divulging personal information to a phishing attempt or other fraud, change your passwords to affected sites immediately and contact your bank, credit card companies, and the credit bureaus to request a fraud alert.
- Please note that TV Tropes cannot assist you with the specifics of maintaining your computer. That's your responsibility. You may request general help in the appropriate forums, but please don't post new threads in the forums dedicated to wiki operation (Wiki Talk, Frequently Asked Questions, etc.).
- Sometimes, the wiki administration can get better results from the ad providers in dealing with malicious ads. If you can identify a malicious ad by referral URL, you can post the link in this thread, but please omit the "http" component so it doesn't create a hyperlink that someone might click on inadvertently.
- For image ads, right-clicking (or a long tap on mobile devices) should give you the option to view and copy the URL that clicking on it will send you to.
- For Flash, Java, or HTML 5.0 ads, it may be difficult to identify the source or the URL by right-clicking. In these cases, you need to view the page source to identify the ad so we can report it.
- In Internet Explorer, you can right-click in a blank or text area of any web page, and choose View Source from the context menu. Firefox also has this option. In Chrome, you can use the Inspect Element menu option, which interactively highlights the portion of the page whose code you are hovering over. You can use this to identify the ad frame and its source URL.
- For embedded ads, there will be a "frame" element with a "src" parameter. Drill down until you get to the lowest level. All we need to identify the ad is the "src" URL from that frame.
for more information or to discuss the service.
Edited by kory on Nov 15th 2023 at 10:36:27 AM
Nothing, it just gets stuck in an infinite loop and I have to force-quit Firefox. For a while it was giving me "Warning: unresponsive script" errors, and it would work after I killed the script, but now it's not even doing that.
Tief girl with eartude
I seem to be getting a lot more errors that are keeping FF locked up, without loading the new page and giving the error message, too.
TV Tropes's No. 1 bread themed lesbian. she/her, fae/faer
Wick checker for hire
So I'm not the only one with this issue. I thought that it was to blame at the most recent system update for Windows 7 that made my laptop slow as fuck.
The best character is always the one-shot disguise.
... and here i thought I had to resort to using noscript/adblock(seriously, i don't use either. ads don't bother me and i like the sexy ads i'm getting). any word from google on what's wrong with their syndication thing?
Is dast der Zerstorer? Odar die Schopfer?
The Final ECW Champion
Uninstalling some plugins seems to speed things up a little but most Fire Fox versions still seem to crash.
Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack
Okay, I just got two unresponsive script warnings on one page (Violently Protective Girlfriend at about 4:45 CDT, if it matters). First one was "relestar.com/static/js/jquery-1.5.2.min.js:16", and the second was "websking.com/static/flowplayer/flowplayer-3.2.12.min.js:24". I'm using Firefox 24 (currently on Kubuntu Linux, though I do sometimes get similar hiccups on my Windows 7 rig - same browser and version, though).
Did you know this section has a character limit?
I'm getting ads for "Durex Pleasure Gel, as seen on Celebrity Apprentice". As Durex is a condom/lubricant company, I'm pretty sure that's sexual lubricant I'm being advertised. Is that against the advertising rules, or must I tough it out?
They do have medals for almost, and they're called silver!
To my knowledge, sexual ads are run of the mill here. Unless they are NSFW, in which case they ought to be reported.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
There have been email exchanges. Took a few to get them to understand that it was their code causing the problem. They kept asking for links to the "ad causing the problem." Like the idea that there could be a flaw in Google code was just too impossible, so impossible that the sentence just sounded like gibberish to them.
Goal: Clear, Concise and Witty
The Final ECW Champion
Well, thank you Fast Eddy and good luck. I thought I had just found a way to fix the problem (I thought it might relate to Windows Seven) but it still came up with version 8. If I find the specific ad link I will put in the thread (assuming it does not crash the clipboard and laptop that is).
Anyway, http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/js/google_top_exp.js:7 (along with js:1) is one of the problematic scripts but following the link to it seems pretty harmless.
edited 17th Oct '13 11:22:05 AM by Cider
Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack
Suffering from the same problem. I did use a script blocker to solve it, but that disables my ability to edit my own posts and whatnot.
You should be able to whitelist the scripts from tvtropes.org while the Google scripts remain blocked
I see. There an add-on for Firefox since I'm using that as the main browser?
It should be doable with NoScript/YesScript. Not sure exactly how, it's been a long time since I've messed with either of those extensions
Used NoScript and it works. I'll use it until there's a way to fix the problem.
edited 18th Oct '13 11:13:58 AM by Ominae
Got an auto-playing video ad. The sound doesn't play unless you mouse over the ad, but the video runs automatically. Source is http://gslbeacon.lijit.com/beacon?viewId=474d4a6c304d442fada1e8ed1733fe9f&rand=7089&uri=http://www.lijit.com/users/tvtropesorg&informer=8972242&type=fpads&loc=http%3A%2F%2Ftvtropes.org%2Fpmwiki%2Fpmwiki.php%2FMain%2FDarkReign&v=1.0&rr=http%3A%2F%2Ftvtropes.org%2Fpmwiki%2Fpmwiki.php%2FMain%2FDarkReign.
edited 22nd Oct '13 11:47:25 AM by Nocturna
Also getting autoplay video ads, on a variety of pages. They are at the bottom of the page, which does freak you out a little bit until you realize you aren't suddenly Hearing Voices.
Lost in Space
I would love it if we could tell the ad provider to just dump any ad for Wartune. They are getting balls-out stupid again, with "Explicit content" warnings and "Male gamers only" plastered over scantily clad women. From my understanding, all that is a lie, anyway.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
NOT THE BEES
Yeah, the game got heavily promoted on Kongregate before they started with the ridiculous Evony-style ads. It's exactly the same skimpy-but-not-quite-NSFW outfits you see on every dull pay-to-win MMO ever, so it's poor-taste and false advertising.
Anyway, I'm getting Flash plugin crashes on Chrome on this site. May or may not be related — I haven't really bothered using Chrome here until Firefox started freezing, so I don't know if that happened before. It happens about as often though.
edited 24th Oct '13 6:27:25 PM by Pykrete
Speaking of ads, is it normal that the "ilovesports." ads tend to pop up?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
This is going to sound odd but can we please remove that ad for Skittles where the person is toothless and has skittles for teeth? It's a huge trigger for me (mouth pain and tooth stuff in general is... let's just say I've had some unfun experiences with dentistry)
Lost in Space
Sorry, that's not a legitimate reason to remove an ad. It gives me sympathetic pain too, but I deal with it.
edited 26th Oct '13 7:02:54 AM by Fighteer
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Some Gal
Got a couple ads on my Firefox that each froze the browser for a good few minutes before displaying an unresponsive script error message.
http://b.scorecardresearch.com/rs/vce_st.js:1
http://choices.truste.com/ca?aid=attssl02&pid=mec01&locale=en&c=_LBcLB_&cid=0112mec&sid=_LBsidLB_&language=en&js=st_2&cam=3:78
a.k.a. Cly, that one girl who doesn't post here much anymore Something something YI = SMW 2 = SMB 5.
^What error message do they give?
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman