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
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
- Hit the thing with three bars in the upper right; the drop-down menu thing.
- Mouse over "more tools."
- Hit "Java Console" (I may not be getting the name exactly right; just hit the one that says Java on it).
- On the bigass panel that should swallow up like half the screen, hit the gear shape in the upper right.
- An option saying "Disable Java" or something like it should be in the upper left of the settings thing that comes up. Hit that, then click on X's (There's no Save Changes button to worry about) until the panel's gone, then refresh the page and continue on as normal.
The smiley buttons in the Add Post page won't work, and a couple other buttons elsewhere might not (and there's no telling what it'll mess up on other sites), but you shouldn't have to worry about redirect ads.
edited 1st Dec '14 1:02:54 PM by Knowlessman
i care but i'm restless, i'm here but i'm really gone, i'm wrong and i'm sorry, baby
Thank you!
"Psssh. Even if you could catch a miracle on a picture any person would probably delete it to make space for more porn." - Aszur
Heh.
I got the carsmenu.com thing twice while trying to read this thread.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
I'm trying to pos-carsmenu.com.
Help!
I never get the carsmenu redirects. Weird.
Working on the carsmenu.com domain now. Let me know if you are still getting the redirect.
The exact same thing happened to me just now. 
One of them hit a separate tab, though; one moment, I was reading drewski's post, and the next, I glanced up at my other tabs and noticed one of them was on carsmenu.com. ![[nja]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/user_ninja_2074.png "[nja]"){kind=small}
I've been getting it while trying to go to the World War II/Europe page; clicking back brings me to the previous page. Other times usually comes up when I just click in the middle of the page, nowhere near the ads or any links.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one experiencing this issue. Quite odd. I'm on a Mac if anyone can help.
I'm still getting it, it seems.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
Oh god, I there are more of them. I think we have a malware problem.
Lost in Space
It's ads. It's always the ads. Some naughty ad buyer slipped a malicious one into the providers' rotations and we have to suffer through it until they fix it. Remember, ad providers serve advertisers, not users.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
I really wish advertising as a business would just collapse on itself and die, and some other less invasive form of internet revenue would rise up. It'll never happen, but it'd be nice.
Hopefully this carsmenu thing will be resolved soon, though, because the site is unusable in its current state.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
INCARNATION OF POWER
I literally was typing a post, and didn't click a single thing. I got up for a minute (nobody touched the pc) and came back. the page had send me to this page: http://carsmenu.com/
That's what pretty much everyone's been hit with, apparently.
Yes, got plenty of complaints. The admins are trying to get rid of that issue (as well as doing a dozen other stuff as well, related to Big Things).
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
He/Him
Twice, in this thread, I've gotten a giant (as in standard youtube video sized) talking ad for the movie Exodus that I couldn't stop, or do anything with (no controls whatsoever and right clicking didn't provide a means to stop it). Even though it didn't extend that far up (it extended downward over most of the text at the bottom of the screen), I couldn't click the post button to report it, so I had to refresh it and click post before it came up.
Don't know who the advertiser was, but I did catch a brief glimpse of one of those RAM hogging video ads at the bottom before the Exodus ad covered it and a bunch of other stuff.
edited 4th Dec '14 2:00:20 AM by Acebrock
My troper wall
Yep, I just encountered the Exodus ad myself, and boy is it LOUD.
I've also been encountering another auto-playing video lately, which, strangely, seems to be preceded by an ad itself. Once the ad-within-an-ad is done, it plays some video titled "This Day in History [current date]," which apparently is related to searchmojo.com or something like that.
INCARNATION OF POWER
The Exodus Ad is malicious. While getting it, my volume on my PC went from muted to full blast AND my desktop was immediately flooded with images of porn and various things I dare not share. Norton completely failed to stop it.
Yeah, I had to reload the page so that I could post, because the Exodus ad covered the "Add Post" button.
Not to mention I'm getting a "On this day" Mojo ad on every other page. Which at least is quieter, smaller, and has a pause button.
The other stuff you mentioned... might be something else. One of the plagues, maybe?
edited 4th Dec '14 6:48:35 AM by Larkmarn
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
Do y'all have the URL for the Exodus ad?
The Tropes Are With Me.
Okay, so I'm not the first to complain about that damn screen-blocking ad. Will one of the upcoming upgrades include blocking crap like that?
I browse TV tropes using safari on an apple device. Many times, I get a pop up that results in my app store being forced open to download a game. This is, as you could probably guess, very annoying.
I've checked around and found that this is an issue with a specific ad server, (adtrack.king.com I believe) as opposed to a problem with my browsing behavior. (This forum has more information. https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!topic/chrome/EDJTbPaW5dg/discussion ) I delete my cookies and my browsing data, I still get it. I disable ad tracking, I still get it. I've seen that reseting your phone isn't enough to fix it either.
The best solution people have found is disabling javascript, which I can't do since this site has a lot of functionality programmed into its javascript. (search, logging in, etc.)
Please consider looking into your ad providers and fixing this problem. It's not the 90s, I shouldn't be getting pop ups.
INCARNATION OF POWER
Well, and some of the apps have tried to force downlod them. I've had to turn off my device and reset it because it demanded my password to download the app and WOULD NOT let me refuse it.
I've got an ad redirecting me to carsmenu.com. Can't identify it.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"