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So I see that this site has started using skimwords, one of the universally loathed ad "services" that inserts random advertising links in text. It's not quite the worst sort of advertising out there; auto-play audio and video are worse. But advertising links inserted into text are bad enough that if I can't figure out how to disable them, I won't visit the site.
If you stick to game-specific areas, you might not know what I'm talking about; check the hardware forum for threads with several inserted ad links per post. This makes the hardware section of your site look like it's completely overrun by spambots. And that's not OK.
I get that you need revenue. And I'm sympathetic to that. Really. I try not to disable more ads than are necessary to make a site functional. Unfortunately, AdBlock Plus lets skimwords links through for some inexplicable reason if you select "allow non-obtrusive advertising", so now I have to disable that option to use this site.
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It's starting to look like the April Fools joke tweet reported by Teala here from Bill Murphy may not be an April Fools joke after all. Some sites will remove their skimword links if you pay them. I haven't seen any announcement about either the skimwords or a subscription here.
Admin has stated in the past such links would never appear here.
Edit: They are also now showing up in other forum thread posts
I have unchecked "allow acceptable ads" in my AdBlock Plus options in Chrome because of SkimLinks on this site.
I understand that hosting a site costs money, but I'm using my computer, my bandwidth, and my monitor and eyes to look at sites. When advertisements affect the content of the media I'm looking at, I will do what I have to in order to avoid it. I stopped watching television because commercials were excessive. Hulu was a good alternative for a while, but now they have almost as many commercials as broadcast television, so now I only watch shows on Amazon. If I have to avoid this site due to the forum text being altered, I will.
You might be using a cached page or you don't allow the "acceptable ads" though. Change your Adblock Plus option then shift-reload the page.
Hey guys,
I am looking into this for you. Will have more info soon!
OK, so Craig tells me this is unintentional. We dislike these types of ads as much as you do and we'll be rectifying this ASAP.
UPDATE: This will be removed later today. Please consider re-adding us to your whitelists. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Thank you. I've switched my settings back and now your ads are getting through again, except for the Flash ads that don't work because I don't have Flash installed. I'm not seeing any Skimlinks ads, so hopefully its fixed.
One thing that I realized overnight is that it would really be a problem if someone asked for help in building a computer, and I posted a list of parts (or if Ridelynn or jdnewell or someone else did), and then Skimlinks inserted random links to other parts in my post so that the person followed the wrong links and bought the wrong parts.