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
Exxolon
Does reporting adverts actually work? I keep reporting those current account switching ones and the Thomson ones that do the same thing? They are still there! If rogue adverts are just allowed to keep wrecking people's site experience it's no wonder people use Ad Block etc.
How sweet it is
Just when I entered the site, I'm greeted with this redirect:
http://www.pipview.com/lp/page/index.php#Congrats
I'm also being affected by the switch vid ads continuously popping up and actually stopping me from reading the pages I am on.
It needs to either be removed from the site or at the very least muted. As it is very intrusive and really irritating to deal with.
How sweet it is
There is an ad that redirects me to this url, which prompts me if I want to go to the app store:
url (it's long)
edited 23rd Oct '16 4:09:15 PM by Berrenta
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Fits in Heavy's pocket!
Getting redirected to a site called "luvcircle ". It has pictures of ladies in their underwear :/
The last thing you hear before an unstoppable juggernaut bisects you with a minigun.
To be a Master
Safari is reporting that it couldn't verify the certificate of this website, citing the certificate called "proper.io" to be the problem.
edited 24th Oct '16 10:51:08 PM by Shadao
So, I'm currently having a particular issue with the site when I access it by using Safari on my iPad: not only does it take a long time to load, but I can't see anyone's avatars when I go on the forums. For instance, I took a look at someone's avatar gallery and all I saw were small blue boxes with a question mark on them (though a few avatars actually appeared, but that was about it).
Anyone else having this problem?
EDIT: Okay, the problem seems to have been resolved, so never mind this post.
edited 25th Oct '16 4:43:07 AM by IchigoMontoya
A procrastination in of itself
I keep getting a "Congratulations! You've won an X" pop up when viewing on my ipad. I hit close and it bounces me to a website designed to look like google but that's clearly fake.
Can't report the ad as I'm getting redirected. Here's the URL the redirect page holds. http://sw.zq8yowob.pw/ukyep0909p7/001.php?brand=Apple&model=iPad#b
edited 26th Oct '16 12:30:16 PM by Silasw
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
hey i dunno, why don't you tell me
Been getting redirected to one momgifter.com. URL. Think it may be mobile-only.
How sweet it is
There is an ad that autoplays video and appears quite often even after I reported it so many times. The ad in question is a video about making deviled eggs. Accidentally double clicking leads to a place with a problematic security certificate. Fortunately, my computer stopped it from going to the site, instead warning me about it and prompting me to close it.
The url it leads to is mtbsuisse.com
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Pronounced YAK-you-luss
Getting hammered with a whole bunch of redirects to various sites on iOS.
What's precedent ever done for us?
Transcender of Gender
I'm on iPhone 4s and whenever I go onto a new page a pop-up ad for Volvo appears, making me click out of it before I can see the page. It also slows my mobile down to the point that it has to reload the page half the time.
Clicking on it takes me to this address: http://track.celtra.com
Which redirects to here: http://www.volvocars.com/uk/own/maintenance/service-and-maintenance/volvo-service-promise
Normally I'd use Report Advertisement, but all three ad spaces are blank when I get onto the page. I don't know which one of them is supposed to be the offensive ad (unless it's all three of them).
they/them || "Forgive me, regent of queer amphibians" - Lt.BGob
A procrastination in of itself
I'm getting the same mobile based pop-up ad issue but also with a Hendson Global Investment ad.
"And the Bunny nails it!" ~ Gabrael "If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we." ~ Cyran
The Unknown
I occasionally get a mobile pop-up that says I won an iPhone 7. I think this also causes my history to duplicate the same page multiple times, as trying to go back reloads the page unless I click the back button enough or go straight to my history to manually select the previous page from there.
edited 30th Oct '16 12:01:38 AM by Karxrida
If a tree falls in the forest and nobody remembers it, who else will you have ice cream with?
How sweet it is
A redirect asks me to open the App Store. Hitting "Cancel" will not work, as it opens the App Store anyways.
URL
edited 6th Nov '16 10:14:42 AM by Berrenta
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Moved thread to Frequently Asked Questions as part of the retirement of the Tech Wishlist forum.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
How sweet it is
An ad for TubeMogul autoplays sound.
she/her | TRS needs your help! | Contributor of Trope Report
Mweheheh
I'm getting very large advertisements for Sunline Roofing & PeerJ that cover the screen.
Peace is the only battle worth waging.
Heads up that my browser is reporting malicious advertisements. Started just a few minutes ago. Saw a thread over on Bug Reports that shows at least one other user is getting similar.
Ah so this is where this thread is. For some reason I got redirected on my iPhone 4 times within roughly fifteen minutes
About a week ago I went on here in college on my mobile. When I went to the bottom of the screen it said an ad was blocked but I wasn't worried about it that much as it was blocked on my phone. Then a couple of days later at home I go on my phone and I got an ad that doesn't appear anywhere else here that told me about the new Iphone and was a pretty obvious malware. I was not able to get the URL and it hasn't appeared since.
Not that kind of doctor
I was browsing TV Tropes yesterday (12/30/2016) and having just a single TV Tropes page open bogged down my browser (Chrome on Mac) and used GB of RAM to the point that I couldn't even scroll down the page without waiting 10s of seconds for the browser to respond. Refreshing the pages did nothing to resolve the problem. I installed an adblocker extension to check whether ads were the problem, and sure enough, had zero problem browsing the exact same pages.
The page I that I know was bogging down, since I tried the adblocker on it, was Controversy-Proof Image, but it appeared to me that other pages like Ask The Tropers and some of the forum threads were doing the same thing at the time. I just returned to Controversy-Proof Image today with adblocker turned off, and the page seems to be behaving ok now.
Unfortunately, I can't tell you what ads were on the page when it was causing the problem. I think I recall seeing a sidebar ad for Shadowhunters, but don't recall the top and bottom banner ads. Today, the top and bottom banners are Shadowhunter ads, but they do not seem to be causing an issue.
Just wanted to make you aware of this in case it happens again. I prefer not to block the ads that fund the site, but yesterday they were making the site unusable.
Edited to ad: This forum page just bogged down for me in a similar way (ads for Xfinity and 2017 Ford Escape). When adblock was turned on before refreshing the page, it claimed it was blocking 100+ ads. After refreshing the page, the number of blocked ads dropped to 2 and the page returned to normal behavior.
edited 30th Dec '16 9:41:10 AM by NotOnAnyFlatbread
Same thing's been happening to me the past couple days. ATT in particular is a nightmare, I have to type my queries in Notepad and copy/paste and it still takes a full minute of loading.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.
There's a "listen2yourselfie" anti-marijuana video ad that pops up over the screen until you click it away that has been plaguing my browsing today. Though all sound is currently turned off on my computer, the tab bar indicates that it is auto-playing sound too.
edited 4th Jan '17 6:48:55 PM by HeroicJay
Video ads for https://www.currentaccountswitch.co.uk/Pages/Home.aspx
are autoplaying sound and video (usually two per page) and snapping the browser window to the advert - the site is currently almost unusable for me due to them.