Lazeez's Corner

Popup Ads on our sites!

I’ve been receiving many questions and complaints lately about popup ads littering the text on storiesonline and finestories. Even a couple of reports about outright graphical ads on the site.

Let me make something clear: storiesonline and finestories don’t serve, host or link to ads.

These ads are typically served by a malware-style browser extensions. Firefox, Chrome and IE have such extensions.

The easiest way to verify this is to turn off all the browser extension that you have and see the ads vanish.

To identify the offending extension, turn extensions back on one at a time. When the ads come back, the last extension activated is the culprit.

Lazeez

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20 responses to “Popup Ads on our sites!”

  2. guess i have been lucky. i have never seen a pop up add on your great site. i am very greatfull for you great site. thank you for all the hours of fun reading i have had and all the futuor hours of fun reading i am hope to have.

  4. Thanks for that, Lazeez. It took me less than a minute to find the offending extension on my Firefox browser and eliminate it.

    • So which one was it?
      Let’s get a list of the offenders so the folks that aren’t too computer literate have a clue….

  7. I think, on my Firefox, the problem turned out to be with the Shockwave Flash add on, if you’re referring to random words in web pages, including SoL, being highlighted and linked with some advertising site.

    At least, when I disabled the add on the highlighting disappeared.

    • I couldn’t live without Flash Player so reinstalled it, but I have found the problem, for me anyway. It’s a program called Text Enhance, and for me it was part of another program called Coupon Companion. I had to remove Coupon Companion from my computer using uninstall from the Control Panel, and remove the Coupon Companion extension from Firefox.

      This was after research through Mozilla Help.

  10. I had this problem and when I looked at my extensions I had one called ZoomEx. This is a known problem (now known by me!) that says it is an extension to zoom pictures by pointing at them. I deleted it and the problems wend away.

    One thing you can do is search on the names of all Firefox extensions you have installed. I understand this problem has several manifestations.

  11. Chipster82 asked about extensions on Chrome.

    Click on the 3 horizontal lines in the upper right hand corner of the Chrome window (just below the X that closes the window). The 3 lines follows the same motif as Android.

    Click on Tools and select extensions. Make sure you know what each extension does. Some are good, I use X-notifier to handle my three gmail accounts. The others that I have a Norton (security), Search Box and AdBlock.

    Let me know if you have any problems. I use both Firefox and Chrome regularly.

    The is a known Java problem floating around that has caused me some problems with Shockwave on Firefox. Look at the Mozilla (Firefox) website (search for “Firefox Java”)

    Regards, Jack

  12. About 2:00 a.m. this morning I was given a msg “could not connect” and I’ve been cut since. Is my account ok, or can you fix this? Please reply

  15. At this very moment I am talking to the one and only cmsix. He tells me to let everyone know he is alive and is in better shape than he deserves.
    Please post this and spread the word.

    • Just read this now–only two months late, right? Thanks for the news, and I am glad cmsix is still alive and kicking.