New Advertising methods on Boards

What's the deal with all the scam junk mail ads lately which are huge and have flashing borders. Surely these scam adverts give boards a bad name as they are far from genuine. Examples include;

1millionth customer click to receive free iPhone - this one is in the middle of all the pages I visit, I must have clicked it 50 times by accident

Earn €75 per week click here

Click here you have 1 mail.

Ya it is rather trivial for a company with the resources Google has, to devise a solution for automatically determining whether the ads are put into the correct category as well - so it is definitely a deliberate policy, that the categories are 'broken' (feature, not a bug), and that miscategorised ads are let slip through.

It's obviously a rather major problem, that is not going to go away - probably ever - so that's scoring quite a bad own goal there, putting profits in the short-term ahead, when ultimately this is going to lead to ads becoming a far less viable source of revenue, users and actual web browsers themselves, crack down on them.

Not only will this hurt Google ultimately, it will hurt the sites that use their ad services too.

Do you have a sample skimlink to test? I suspect that it may cause me a pita on my home PCs as affiliate providers are blocked along with all ad providers via a hosts file. Not too much of a pita as I don't use links from boards a lot to purchase stuff so I'm more curious than concerned.

Orion wrote: »

Do you have a sample skimlink to test? I suspect that it may cause me a pita on my home PCs as affiliate providers are blocked along with all ad providers via a hosts file. Not too much of a pita as I don't use links from boards a lot to purchase stuff so I'm more curious than concerned.

I just realised this is a thread from September. I obviously haven't had an issue so ignore this post. Doh!

eamonnq wrote: »

No, I posted asking about this today only.

Have tried it on a different browser and am still getting it, goredirecting.at comes up first, then shareasale and then the link opens.

I meant ignore mine

I'm just wondering are you suddenly using ads that automatically load as you scroll down on mobile browsers on the touch site ?

Twice this morning ads have launched from nowhere on mobile safari while using boards.ie

Can you please reconsider as it's very annoying and would put me right off the site.

Heighway61 wrote: »

Is this still the case? On a test thread I created here - boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=101272223&postcount=1 - the "game.co.uk" text is converted to a skimlinks link (but the boards.ie text isn't). On phone, not desktop.

Thanks for that Heighway61. Just to clarify, converting text that appears to be a link into an actual link on the site is nothing to do with Skimlinks, it is part of our own code base (in fact, this feature existed on the site before we ever implemented Skimlinks). So, Skimlinks will not convert any text to links, Skimlinks will only add affiliate tags to any actual links it finds on the site.

Why game.co.uk converts to a link and boards.ie doesn't is something we need to look into but this is an issue with our code rather than Skimlinks.

seamus wrote: »

It looks like the responsive site is trying to be clever about converting "looks like" URLs into URLs.

An unintended consequence of which would be the addition of skimlinks to things which had been autoconverted.

The skimlinks code probably looks at anything with a [url] tag in it and converts that to a skimlink. The responsive site is trying to be helpful by adding tags to anything that looks like a URL, but then the skimlinks tag is assuming this was intentional by the user and adding the skimlink to it.

Seamus, had a look at this as well. What is happening is that if you are on the legacy site and you click game.co.uk all behaves as expected - Skimlinks links adds some affiliate tags and then sends you on to the site. But if you are on the responsive site you get an error saying the site cannot be reached.

On the legacy site game.co.uk links resolves to http://game.co.uk. If you try typing this directly into your browser address bar then you will get the site as expected.

However on the responsive site game.co.uk resolves to https://game.co.uk. Try typing this directly into your browser address bar and you will get the site cannot be reached error.

So the issue is this: on the responsive site we have implemented https across the site for security reasons. So all links on the site default to https. For links like game.co.uk this throws an error. What we need to do is use https for all internal links on the site and http for any external links which would resolve the issue.

This does not occur on the legacy site as the legacy site does not use https by default. Again, this is nothing to do with the affiliate links that Skimlinks adds and would still be the case if Skimlinks was removed from Boards.

We're looking into updating the code to fix this issue. Thanks, Sean

I wanted to give you an update on the case of plain text being automatically converted to links when a post is submitted.

In my last post I said that the conversion of plain text into links was not a Skimlinks issue but a result of our own code. However, once we started digging into our code base to figure out what was going on we discovered that this was not actually the case and what I said in my last post was wrong. What i said in that post was said in good faith but it turns out there have been some changes to how Skimlinks works which we were unaware of (I have since clarified matters with Skimlinks) and that Skimlinks does convert to certain text entries to links.

Skimlinks will convert any url looking text into a link _if_ the text matches one of it's partner merchant sites. So 'argos.ie' gets changed to a link.

However, 'argos' does not (as this is just the name of the brand rather than a url) nor does 'boards.ie' (as boards.ie is not a Skimlinks partner merchant site)

So, sorry about the confusion but we have only found out this change in behaviour now and I wanted to let you know as soon as we did. That leaves us with two choices: keep Skimlinks and accept this behaviour or turn off Skimlinks altogether.

We are planning to keep Skimlinks. Why? Because ultimately, it helps keep the lights on here (and the server's running, and the hosting centre paid and the developers employed ...... etc.). Yes, I know that we are making income off people's posts but the quid quo pro is that we keep a large and very heavily trafficked site up-and-running and free for all users (ultimately it costs money to host a site like Boards and we have to find some means of generating that income in order to be sustainable).

Remember that any user of Boards can turn off Skimlinks at any stage, you simply have to go to http://optout.skimlinks.com/ to opt out (note that this is cookie based so clearing cookies, using a different browser or a different machine will mean that you will need to opt out again)

Thanks, Sean

Foresty wrote: »

^^Yea, the optout never worked. It was mentioned way back last year in this thread.

We also been looking into the Skimlinks optout. It appears that like Google, Amazon and many others Skimlinks will track users browsing behaviour (presumably for analytical purposes and to help them serve up more relevant ads).

Just to be clear, this is not unique to Skimlinks on Boards, it will be the case if you visit or have at any stage visited any site with Skimlinks enabled (unless of course you have cleared your cookies in the meantime). So it looks like the optin / optout Skimlinks link turns on or off this tracking. This isn't an optin / optout for Skimlinks on Boards, I believe it is an optin /optout for Skimlinks across the web.

the groutch wrote: »

and how many users will know this?
it's likely a very small percentage of users ever come near this forum.

at minimum there should be an update to the charter in Bargain alerts to make people aware of this situation.

That's a fair point and we will look to update the Bargain Alerts charter with this information. However, this raises a more general point of how to inform users of Boards of information like this. I have just run the stats for the last month (23 Sept - 23 Oct). Based on pageviews numbers 0.014% of Bargain Alerts pages viewed by users were of the forum charter (that is 14 views of the charter for every 100,000 Bargain Alerts pages viewed).

So I am happy to update the charter but the the Bargain Alerts charter, like most forum charters on the site, is almost never viewed by visitors to that forum

Heighway61 wrote: »

Also, is clk.tradedoubler.com part of skimlinks or another company you deal with?

Thanks.

Just wanted to come back to you on the clk.tradedoubler.com question.

I contacted Skimlinks about this and asked why when clicking on certain links you are first redirected first to go.redirectingat.com (this is expected behaviour) and then to clk.tradedoubler.com and then to the merchant site. This was the response I got back from Skimlinks:

Being redirected to clk.tradedoubler.com depends on the merchant in question as Skimlinks works with a variety of affiliate networks (Linkshare, Tradedoubler, Pepperjam etc). It appears the merchant must have been under the Tradedoubler affiliate network.

We ask Merchants to join a Network because Networks have the technical solution to track clicks, sales, etc.

Hope this helps. S.

Boards.ie: Seán wrote: »

That's a fair point and we will look to update the Bargain Alerts charter with this information. However, this raises a more general point of how to inform users of Boards of information like this. I have just run the stats for the last month (23 Sept - 23 Oct). Based on pageviews numbers 0.014% of Bargain Alerts pages viewed by users were of the forum charter (that is 14 views of the charter for every 100,000 Bargain Alerts pages viewed).

So I am happy to update the charter but the the Bargain Alerts charter, like most forum charters on the site, is almost never viewed by visitors to that forum

Just on this - is this on instances of pages viewed or is it possible to get the stats on views per user. People might read the charter once and then not again if it isn't updated. Whereas the active threads will be read many times by the same user.

Sorry if this is OT - just a point of interest.

Hi implausible,

Thanks for that. I just looked through the thread. You made 16 posts (post #5, #7, #14, #24, #27, #28, #36, #37, #40, #42, #51, #52, #53, #55, #60, #66). Post #5 contained 3 links to

https://curriculumonline.ie/getmedia/60ec6b68-b289-4f32-ba62-3e7ac9e6d950/EnglishJC_-AssessmentGuidelines_04-12-15.pdf
http://www.jct.ie/perch/resources/english_pdf/day-2-booklet-3.pdf
http://www.juniorcycle.ie/NCCA_JuniorCycle/media/NCCA/Assessment-Task-example-and-guidelines.pdf

I tried all 3 links and they all went directly to the websites in question. None of them went through go.redirectingat.co. None of your other posts had links. So, on my machine things behaved as expected.

Could you try clicking on the links again in your post and see if they're working. Thanks