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
A real bad hombre
I'm getting those stupid banner ads on every.single.page.
"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." -Thomas Edison
Dreammaster1
Put me down for another 'annoying banner ad'. It slides in and out, screwing with the page layout. It's happened on every page today.
It's happening to me as well.
Seriously, what scatter-brained half-wit at Google thought this was a good idea?
simple as
Pretty flower
Getting the same Ad problem.
#IceBearForPresident
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
Excuse me, invisible ad that doesn't even advertise anything; I'm trying to be on a site here.
Whose fucked-up idea was that? We already have nice, relatively unobtrusive banner ads; who decided more banner ads, that outright shove your goddamn screen to the side, were needed?
Next we'll have fucking full-screen ads that make you wait ten seconds before even seeing the site you're supposed to be on.
I thought I wasn't going to need Ad Block. -_-
It doesn't even make the page sidescroll; you just don't have the rightmost three inches or so of the page until you tell the fucking thing to go away.
edited 4th May '15 4:31:34 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
COME, AND SEE
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
deviantart ACTUALLY HAS THAT
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
So, disabling Javascript gets rid of that, but also makes spoilers stuck on invisible.
*sigh* I will deal with having spoilers stuck on invisible if it means I don't get the screen-shoving ads. Just tell me when they realize it's a fucking stupid-ass idea so I can turn Java back on.
And then it turns out I can't edit posts.
Lemme see if I can wrangle things to kill only that. What's blackboxing mean, and should disabling do it if I can find the right bit of code?
edited 4th May '15 4:42:53 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
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
I'M A GENIUS. Well, okay, Lirodon is and I made a lucky guess as to what to do.
In Chrome (that's what I'm using; if you have a different browser, well, look for stuff that probably does the same thing), go in the Javascript console under Tools (or More Tools, which is where it is for me), and go in the settings for that (gear symbol), and look for the Framework Blackboxing doohickey. I don't have the faintest fucking idea what blackboxing is, but if you open that up, put "tynt.css" in the textbox, and select Disable from the dropdown menu that says Blackbox by default, I think that shuts it off without sabotaging any of the site's other functions. At least, it seems to be working that way for me.
edited 4th May '15 4:53:50 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
COME, AND SEE
Knowless Man: it's already been nuked....
and the pushover ad lasted 3 hours in the ring
My game. I reckon it's gonna be a big one
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
...Oh. :[ So, I'm not a genius then.
i care but i'm restless, i'm here but i'm really gone, i'm wrong and i'm sorry, baby
COME, AND SEE
maybe you are and it did work. I'm just saying it's no longer necessary.
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
It did go away immediately after I did that, so either that was a hella epic coincidence, or I got lucky in a way that was then rendered immediately moot. :|
i care but i'm restless, i'm here but i'm really gone, i'm wrong and i'm sorry, baby
I am Jack's Smirking Revenge
The embedded video ads are starting to be a significant problem; they force the browser down to the part of the page the video is at, making it impossible to scroll larger pages. I realize you need the videos for ad revenue, but there needs to be some way of having the video scroll along with the content, like a top banner, instead of making the browser wildly jump around.
I'm not yelling or anything, don't get me wrong, just a friendly heads up - though I assume others have already shouted a lot more about it.
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
They do what? :/ They shouldn't be doing that, and aren't on my computer (though I do have flash on click-to-play, so it usually shuts them up regardless).
COME, AND SEE
That is not allowed. Ads cannot alter your page experience or force you to watch them or force you to listen to them, period. All they can do is sit there and do their thing. I don't get those ads at all. Tbh, i don't think tvtropes is even in control of the ads at this point. Google's just doing whatever it can to annoy the heck out of us.
edited 5th May '15 8:12:03 PM by TheGreatDuck
My game. I reckon it's gonna be a big one
Yeah the ads should definitely not be doing that. We are trying to block some of the more problematic video ads and switching to ones that just play once, not on a loop. It seems advertisers are really into video ads right now, so we are just going with the flow.
Yeah, I'm having that autoscrolling problem, too. I'm pretty sure every time it's happened, it's been a Starbucks ad.
... they're loud as hell, too. But that's just a comment, not a huge deal.
edited 7th May '15 7:34:18 AM by Larkmarn
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
Cutie Snark Crusader
I got redirected to a malicious update page hosted on lp.playerpage202.info
I've been frequently getting malicious update pages as well (the ones that make message boxes show up saying you need to update, then booting you out of the page to their fake update page), mostly starting today. Chrome managed to block one of them long enough for me to quickly snag its URL. note
(NOTE: As the URL may be screwed up by TV Tropes' dash thing that separates long letter chains; here's a tiny URL just in case note )
edited 9th May '15 12:47:33 AM by TheHoboTortle
pffft hahahahahahahahahhhaahhahaha no
Everybody's dead, Dave.
Alright, so now that I've seen something pretty alarming, it's time that I posted something here.
I got a nasty looking ad telling me I needed to do a scan... Or something like that. I carefully extracted a link.
edited 9th May '15 3:50:42 AM by Pyrarson
H.B. Ward
Chaotic Greedy
I just got redirected from the Sinfest thread to this address:
http://d.afftrx.com/?s=1564565
Just got the side-shift ad (on IE). Haven't seen it elsewhere... yet.
edited 10th May '15 7:36:20 AM by Chabal2
Parole Model
Some video ads are up, called Sekindo on streaming interface and/or starting splash-screens. These start playing on their own in right column square spots.
One out of some 7 had a moment of sound on accidental mouse hover (youtube or other videostream-like interface pops up at picture edges). Most of the time they are videos without sound. One to several minutes long. Of the two banners, upper one is on a loop. Lower one plays through and stops.
I'm not clicking those to test further, just reporting.
edited 10th May '15 10:26:16 AM by SetsunasaNiWa
Everybody's dead, Dave.
So we got these new vertical banner ads that literally slide in and push things to the side if you're in Wide Load mode.
I took a peak at the CSS markup, and they're "tynt".
edited 4th May '15 4:04:27 PM by Lirodon